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Blueliner has diversified its offerings to include content production and podcasting services. Its flagship series, Drita Uncut, is a groundbreaking new video and audio podcast hosted by reality TV star, Drita Davanzo. Known for her dynamic presence and legendary storytelling, Drita is bringing fresh, unfiltered content to her fans and listeners around the globe.

Join Blueliner for an inspiring entrepreneurial journey, which unfolds from the streets of Lebanon to the world’s fashion capital, New York City. Jack Georges, the founder of Jack Georges Leather Goods, shares how he built a team and a brand to last–37 years and counting.

Told through an interactive conversation with Blueliner CEO Arman Rousta, and supplemented with behind-the-scenes product development and production footage from his Passaic, New Jersey warehouse, Jack offers 9 Business Tips for fellow entrepreneurs. He also discusses the latest Jack Georges marketing campaign – Postcards from Jack, led through a collaboration with Blueliner.

2024 promises to be a momentous year across the social, cultural, and political spectra. Now that New Year’s Day has come and gone, what will the next twelve months mean for the world of digital marketing? From generative AI to the short-form video revolution, here are six key trends to keep your eyes on in the days to come.

In October, we signed on as Agency of Record for a well-established but under the radar fashion brand, Jack Georges, an independent maker of handmade leather goods since 1987. Jack Georges has everything that we look for in a client – great product, an intriguing entrepreneurial story and a non-corporate culture. The brand is backed by the man himself, you guessed it – Jack Georges. This month, we want to share more of Jack’s story and talk about how Blueliner has approached our role, on this second go around (we had initially worked with Jack Georges over 10 years ago on a few specific projects – SEO, Website and a Brand Photoshoot). It has been a lot of fun, with some early marketing success stories that can hopefully illuminate other small businesses and entrepreneurs aspiring to build meaningful brands and customer relationships.

With 25+ years of experience, having invented numerous products and attained hundreds of patents and trademarks, Arman Rousta of Blueliner highlights some of the best practices in product development and management that his companies have put into practice. Some of the topics covered include how to manage your Intellectual Property (IP), working with industrial engineers, product marketing, various stages of product management, point of sale merchandising, dealing with customer feedback and evaluating competition. A special focus is given to tech-centric products, including apps and ‘hard tech’ or smart products.

The video can be viewed in its entirety below, or accessed through the following, unabridged transcript.

[Note: the transcript was automatically generated through AI. We apologize for any errors or distortions.]

All right, welcome, welcome, everybody. Want to clock sharp. Thursday, September 21st, 2023. This is Arman Rousta from Blueliner. All juiced up for this topic today. Best practices and product development, product marketing, product management. Coming to you live from multiple platforms for the first time. We hope it works well. Whether you’re joining us from Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or straight up from Zoom or catching this later on recording, we’ll have that available as well. So I’ll give everyone a minute or two to get your sandwich, get your lunch, grab a drink, grab a tea, coffee, and join me for an interesting exploration into a bit of my history–Blueliner’s history–what we’ve done, what I’ve done over these 27 plus years. Man, I can’t believe it’s been that long in this space of basically inventing, creating, conceiving, bringing to market various products.

So I’m gonna jump around quite a bit. Those of you that know me know that’s my style. A couple of different presentations, a couple of shots just kind of talking to you like this. And then walking around our lab, it’s like a museum here of different products that we’ve invented and helped bring to market over time. And just thinking out loud and letting you into my brain as far as what I think about and look for when evaluating new products, new opportunities, and thinking about the challenges and what it’s gonna take and what it’s gonna cost to make it happen, to bring ideas to market and have success. So with that said, let me get back to a presentation here. Again, I’ll jump around a bit.

First, let me talk a little bit about my background, if you wouldn’t mind indulging me for a second here. Let’s share a screen all. So that’s me back in the day, playing soccer and bringing that passion for teamwork, for collaboration. A team is a product, right? When we think about products, let’s go beyond, you know, a product you can hold in your hand. Obviously we’re in an app tech-centric world now. So apps are products, physical products, your service, if you’re a service provider, is a product. You are a product. I am a product. How we present ourselves, our body, how it functions is a product as well. So let’s think about it that way. And you know, I always prescribe, and we’ve written a book about this. We have these the seven pillars and the sports edition and these principles that I’ll bring forward because those principles apply to best practices in marketing, best practices, really in life, and particularly in this case and for today in product development.

So I’ve spent 27 years, my whole career in this space, developing products, bringing them to market. Not to go through the whole history, but we started with an amazing smart car tech product called Park Zone. We kind of invented it by accident because we were working on a bigger product called No Zone, a blind Spot detector. And then we just happened across more of a gadget item, which I’m actually gonna demo. I have one in the office here. And brings back great memories. See, you know, one of my best friends, Charles Almo and I working on this over, over our initial time out of college and brought it to market, sold it to a public company, won a number of awards, and we were definitely way ahead of our time before the term Smart car was even invented.

We were calling it like collision avoidance sensors and automotive electronics. Great space to be in and kind of like cut our teeth as young entrepreneurs, young product developers. And then moving forward years in the agency business, working with other products from pet products to again, actual services to launching hospitals and medical practices and other alternative wellness product lines that’s either sold in stores or had their own shops. What kind of signage, what kind of marketing, what kind of promotions and pricing. You, it’s basically a holistic process, product management, right? You have to think about every aspect and every touch point with your community, with your location, with your potential customer base. All that culminated into, you know, myself and Blueliner being invited to join and be a founding member in in a JustCo, which launched the successful product Adjust Lock, which we’ll get into, which is won many awards and has global distribution, and a, a, a very IP centric strategy, IP standing for intellectual property.

Which, you know, when you have intellectual property, it’s a great competitive advantage to be able to price your product a little bit higher or boast unique features that others can’t necessarily copy directly, but not every product, you know, has that luxury or benefit. And it’s also an expensive strategy to pursue, to protect your ip. And then fast forwarding to 2016, when we really took our agency experience and all of our technology engineering experience, from web development, from like more traditional software development into the app space with a whole line of apps under the B Labs umbrella. And and again, now managing, and I spend half of my day in product meetings, in fact this morning, two hours with the basement sports team, and just going through new features, improving old features, every time you add something new, now it’s a whole new stream to manage.

So this is a bit of a synopsis of, of 27 years. And I, I wanna say, I think this discussion here today and this focus on product marketing, product management, product development, is something we’re gonna keep as a recurring theme. I think one hour here today is not, certainly not gonna be enough time to cover all the topics. So there’s gonna be, again, a lot of jumping around and a lot of like, dipping our toe in different aspects of, of product management. You have my commitment that if not once a month, at least once a quarter, I’ll do a new update and installment particularly on, on this topic. And I want to hear from you all. So if you’re on Facebook and LinkedIn now, or hearing it live or coming in later, please comment, add questions, add topics you’d like to see covered, and I’ll evaluate those.

And or if you have a product and you want to do an audit or an evaluation, maybe I’ll bring some of you all on and we’ll, we’ll look at it live and, and give you kind of a live we’ll have a live interaction. So this is gonna be a a series A collection in terms of this kind of workshop, let’s call it which is what it is. So going forward a little bit, again, a bit about Blueliner, and if you want to actually inquire about services, and I’ll talk about this at the end as well. You could see some of our specialties in terms of prototype development, go to market launch plans, integrations between app and web, which is becoming a big trend. And we’ll talk about other trends as well. Hacks actual hard tech products. Another huge trend.

Some of you were on my talk last week with Shaha salami of, of Sporting Goods, formerly with Nike. He talked a lot about, you know, digital transformation and the fact that every company needs to be thinking about their, their technological and digital transformation and, and realizing that it’s just, it’s a new reality. And that we have to think about the digital and technology touchpoints for any product or service that we have. And that’s something we help our clients with the IP strategy we spoke about. So there’s some contact information at the bottom. You could reach out on our website or through the, the info line info@blueliner.io, and we’d love to talk to you if you have an idea that you wanna explore now about some of the things we’ve worked on. Again, award-winning with all of the products, pretty much we’ve had our hands on, have won different kinds of awards and gotten accolades including the adjust lock.

Peter Drucker, one of the modern fathers of, of marketing and management probably in every M B A syllabus talks about how innovation or really product development is really a cornerstone of every business that and marketing, right? So put those things together, and that’s that’s basically the way to win. You know, you have to win and be ahead of the curve in terms of what features and, and value added benefits your product has over others that may be in the market. So we’re gonna sprinkle in some of our principles as we talk through this, as well as case studies like this. I mean, Canon launch this dual fish eye lens product a couple years back, a little less than a couple years for the holiday season. And we were actually on board as a product marketing partner ran a, a very successful campaign.

So this is obviously a whole bunch of product development and product research and knowledge from, you know, Canon’s r and d team. We were no part of that, but to their credit, understanding that VR and ar and these trends for how do you bring media into the new the new era here. And they, they really hit the mark. And of course, there’s competitors in this realm as well, but when you have a brand name like Canon, and you mix that with some cutting edge technology, which people would expect from a brand like Canon, and then you market it well, in terms of the visuals, in terms of how this campaign are, urge you to look this product up and see the visuals, the videos, because it’s a new technology and it’s a lens that goes on top of a certain type of camera line that they have.

So there’s, there’s a bit of learning that comes with anything that’s on the cutting edge of innovation. And that’s one of the, you know, important rules of product marketing and management. There’s that education component to make sure your early adopters are well versed and aren’t frustrated with how to, how to use your new product or technology so they could become your brand advocates. And then the rest of the group that’s been waiting to see what the early adopters say will come on board and follow on, be like the fast followers. So this was a nice case study. We had, you know, health City as well, again, a hospital, a whole product as a whole service practice with 150 doctors. Dr. Shetty, if you’ve heard me speak about him before, his vision for, and the interview with Shamari Scott, who’s chief Business Officer at Health City in the Cayman Islands.

So to take a whole medical concept and say, we need to be closer to the US to provide service, but we can’t be in the us. So when you talk about what, what your market demographic is, but how to access that market with a product, I mean, do, do we really need another hospital? There’s so many already, but the vision for Health City was medical tourism. So it’s a different spin on services that are being performed in the market of the us but it needed to be outside of the US for various legal reasons and pricing. And it’s really a pricing strategy and a quality of service strategy and a bit of a different model. So required many, many years of education in the market, but it needed the right leadership, the right messaging and a really holistic strategy, which is one of the main principles here. You need a kind of a holistic view on your product strategy.

And just some other examples. I won’t, you know, hone in too much on this ’cause I wanna move back to the other presentation. But this is more on the technical side of some of the other products that we’ve worked on and are working on at Blueliner and B Labs. On the more tech side, obviously you have to show your features, right? You know, features is what helps you win. So in this case, it’s basement sports and it’s the streaming, the ability to stream, not just have quick games and quick informal sporting games and contests set up at home in the backyard at a birthday party fun for the whole family, fun for the whole team, group of friends. But the ability to then stream that and cast it to a TV or a screen in the space so kids could see themselves on screen and they get excited.

And then to share that casting in more of a live stream like we’re doing in this video to other friends, other family members on social media, privately in WhatsApp groups, right? So, you know, using common icons, like you see people understand a streaming icon in general and then making sure that the user experience of the application is able to actually make it easy to find those new features. And then to showcase it through a lot of, again, customer education, marketing videos, social media posts, et cetera. And again, a team, a team is a product. Always love to highlight the greats like Jordan, but in this case, right? A quote from, from a great saying that you know, one’s own individual greatness isn’t enough. He could be a key component and feature of the Chicago Bulls, but it’s the teamwork and it’s the way the features work together.

They’re not just, imagine having five great players on a team or on a court, but they’re all individuals. They’re not thinking like a team that’s like having five great features in your product, but they’re disjointed. It’s like, why are these features even together? Should each one be its own app, own product, or do they really flow and complement each other and support each other? So think about it in the analogy that way that teamwork is really like the features and the whole flow of your product line, right? Or your product variations. Maybe it’s different colors or different sizes that need to really flow together and compliment each other well. And yes, an actual sports team beyond the analogy is a product and a coach and a GM has to put a product on the court so that customers will pay either, you know, by their television subscription or go actually go to the arena or stadium and spend their hard-earned money to, to watch that product, right?

To, to consume that product. So, absolutely, you know, every team, every form of entertainment is its own product. And all the details need to be thought out for that product to come together effectively. Another one of our products, which I’ll demo here you know, do we need another food product? And why? You have to answer that question, why is it ’cause that neighborhood needs it? Is it because it’s better ingredients or some new, new food technology or type of concoction, you know, special formula, special recipe. And one has to answer those questions in order to you know, make a case and have a real value proposition for that market. So lemme take a quick breather and break here. Also, welcome anyone who’s joined in late or midstream. We started about 15 minutes ago. We’ll go till the end of the hour.

Again, this will be the first in an ongoing collection and series of talks on product management, product marketing, product development, really innovation and inventions. It’s what I’ve been doing my whole career. Wanna welcome everyone from Facebook, LinkedIn, live, YouTube. Please share it out with others you think may be interested, which would be anyone who’s in the marketing or development or conception of, of products and services. I’m gonna shift over to another presentation here. Stop this, share and share a new screen. So gimme one moment for that all. So let’s, again, best practices. You know, it’s a big, it’s a big word, you know, commonly used term. This is just what I’ve learned and seen, you know, through 27 years of doing this myself for clients with our own products. Tons and tons of mistakes, some pretty good success stories along the way.

And want leave you with some really important takeaways and trends that I see opportunities that are there regardless of whether you’re thinking about everyone has ideas, right? And I talk to people every time you go to a trade show, an event with a booth, with a product, people come up and they’re like, well, I had a similar idea. I had this idea. And it’s, it’s amazing. And I always encourage that. And so hopefully part of the takeaway is what you can do with your idea and just even evaluating whether it’s worth pursuing, which is part of the r and d and the research phase. So before getting into it, just kind of take a moment, you know, maybe get a notepad out and remember, everything’s a product and everyone’s a product manager in some form or another. A farmer, you know, is a product manager managing their crops, managing the food that they produce, that’s their product.

Each of us is managing, again, our own body, our own lives. That’s a product. But think about make a list of 10 products that you interact with most on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, you know, our phones, our mobile devices, your iPhone or your Android phone would be high on the list. So there’ll be some tech products, you know, whether you drink milk every day or have coffee, whether you’re making it or buying it at a local store, those are products. So just make a little list, jot down, you know, 10 or more, you know, products that you interact with often every day, every week, your car, right? The public train system, transit, again, food that you buy what you watch on tv, your, your Disney Plus subscription, right? Your keyboard, your mouse.

And just realize, you know, how many different types of products are in your life. Now, as you start conceiving that and writing your list, whether you can do either on the spot here during the session or afterwards. Then maybe highlight three that are like, very frustrating. What are the three most frustrating products you have in your life? You know, people don’t like, sometimes they’re cable provider or they’re some subscription they have where you can’t get in touch with customer service. Maybe it’s the school, you know, that your kids go to and you’re, you’re, you don’t, you’re not so happy with the product. Maybe you like the school, but you don’t like the teacher they have in a certain class, right? Or it’s, or it’s the coach or from their team, right? All of those are products. So maybe highlight two or three products in your life that you use that you’re not happy with. And and why it’s a good exercise. And this is usually how new products are, are born when people see gaps in markets or problems. And then they say, you know what? I’m frustrated. I can’t get a good sandwich into my neighborhood, so let’s open a sandwich shop, right? For an example.

So yeah, that’s just a bit of a personal and also in your professional life, of course, different products, different softwares using MailChimp for email, whatever it may be. Let all that be part of your list and then circle a few you’re really happy with, a few that you’re not so happy with and why. And that’s really part of this process. And if you’re part of a product team already with whatever your own products or company services are, think about making that list of what are the products that your company offers? And try to give an objective evaluation, right? ’cause That’s what I would do if you came to me and said, we need to improve, or why aren’t we getting the customers we want? The first thing we do is an audit, right? And we wanna see how effective our current products are, and then how can we make them better?

So with that said before getting into some of the other, ’cause a lot of the rest of the presentation is just kind of the steps and stages of, of product marketing, product management, really more the management side. We don’t go too deep into the marketing, but here’s some trends and opportunities that I see right now. You know, not just sustainability, but I just kind of made up this term today, to be honest, mutual sustainability. And what I mean by that, and I listed GrubHub and Amazon as two examples. And this isn’t to be negative ’cause these are services that all of us use. I, I use every day. I just, instead of going across the street to grab the coffee, I ordered it own GrubHub because it would help it be ready for pickup and save me a few minutes.

So that’s why I like using GrubHub or Seamless or whatever you use for, for your food ordering, especially in a walkable city like this, like Jersey City. Here’s the problem though, right? And what I mean about mutual sustainability for the customer, for me, it’s great because they’ve got my credit card and payment and I can order from Hidden Grounds Coffee, which is my favorite spot or any other it’s got all my information saved, it even knows my best orders. So it’s really helping load my cart for a quick reorder. The coffee shop doesn’t love it though, right? Because they’ve gotta pay 30% to GrubHub. So they’re always trying to promote their, hey, download our app, right? But do you really want 60 apps on your phone, one for each different restaurant? I mean, it becomes cumbersome, right? So it’s different products like my cell phone, which doesn’t have enough space, right?

To store 60 new apps. So I like the one as a customer, I like the one, but I have to realize and respect that. And this is what I mean about mutual sustainability. How do we find a win-win solution? How do I make sure that coffee shop doesn’t go out of business? Because they’ve gotta pay all their margin margin to a big tech company, GrubHub, which I, I enjoy. So a lot of times, I, I find, and this is a big trend and something to think about as a consumer, a lot of things we enjoy, like, like Amazon Prime is another example. We all love prime. None of us love like to pay for shipping. So we take advantage of Prime, right? We pay Amazon extra money for a Prime membership so we can get, quote unquote free shipping as a customer. How did the business owners that have to manufacture those products feel about it?

I can tell you because we’re one as basement sports, and it was a terrible experience having to deliver product to customers all around the country for free and not get paid for it. ’cause Guess who pays for it? You have to pay for it. So we were selling a $50 product in a starter kit, and it was a big box, and it cost us a minimum of $15 to ship it, which means we’re making 35, and then all the other cuts that Amazon takes. So it’s kind of Amazon’s way of, you know, trying to offer a great service to the customer, but it’s at the expense of the small businesses and the smaller business owners. So there’s a, it’s a challenging trend, right? It’s like big companies that have pockets and pockets of cash can do these things and free shipping and, and kind of make all these bold offers.

And at the end of the day, the company’s paying for it. So the solution’s not really ready made, but I think it, it, it’s an opportunity, it’s an opportunity for new providers to come up that maybe take less of a cut. I mean, there’s, there’s some margins and pricing analysis there, but how do we support local businesses and make sure we understand you know what, maybe I should walk across the street and just buy it on site, keeps more money in their pocket, and maybe it’s a little less convenient for me. So it’s a bit of a balancing act between what’s convenient for, for the end user what’s sustainable for the small businesses and the businesses that you’re buying from, and then these intermediaries, let’s call them like GrubHub, Amazon, et cetera. So this is a big trend and opportunity for whoever can solve those pain points and make sure it’s kind of win-win.

Everyone can make money. And also as we know the price of everything’s going up with inflation, how do we manage that? That’s, that’s a really collective, mutual problem to solve. Not just something that one co group’s gonna solve, right? So being a good, again, team player with your whole environment, your whole community, I, I see that as a huge trend opportunity, ecosystem development and transparency. So everyone knows the margins and can kind of share equally, it’s a deeper topic for another time. But going forward, obviously AI lowering the cost and speed of product development cycles it, it doesn’t matter what kind of product you’re working on, but if it’s a physical and a visual product, it’s unbelievable what you can do nowadays. And I’m gonna give a quick demo here in a second. Using some AI tools to help come up with concepts, designs, design ideas, whether it’s fashion or furniture or whatever it may be, some tech product whether it’s an onscreen product or an app these AI tools are becoming more and more savvy at being able to just, it’s just like part of the brainstorming team.

And you know what, with that said, let me actually just show you, actually, let me go through this list and I wanna come back to this and actually demo something there, right here on this point, right? So now again, developing an M V P and iterating obviously that’s just a good best practice. You know, you save money by doing a minimum viable product and then get feedback and then iterate from there. That’s just not even just a trend, that’s just an ongoing recommendation and best practice. I want to illustrate another client we’ve worked closely with and talk about elite customer service. Because again, sometimes it’s a good product, but you can’t get someone on the phone, you don’t get a response to customer service. It’s so basic. But it’s hard because you have to be profitable as well and make sure that there’s good customer knowledge, good knowledge, product knowledge for the people providing customer service, right?

And then this part, values-based marketing and partnerships. This gets more into the marketing side, but it’s a huge trend, right? Look, look at what, again, messy is doing, and of course that’s messy, but we can talk about different influencers and different people not just in athletics, but in all walks of, of life that are part of the product, the players, but, but who able to take a percentage of ownership and really align their interests and values with again, the television rights, the different contracts. They have a percentage of ownership in the team so that they can fully represent that organization. In Messi’s case, it’s, it’s inter Miami, as well as all of the M l Ss. And basically raise the bar in the valuation of that whole industry soccer in the whole country here in the us as a result of the way that product, if the product is soccer, and then the product is the m l s league and the product is inter Miami, right?

And then the product at a micro level is messy, the player and creating alignment and synergies across that whole spectrum for us soccer, it’s like the perfect alignment and win-win, again, similar to the mutual sustainability. So yes, you know, values-based marketing, not just someone doing a quick endorsement for a few bucks, right? And, and customers could really tell when there’s a deep alignment, someone that really believes in that product and can represent it very well. There’s no better marketing than that. So with this kind of trend analysis, and there’s just basic, we can go over there, probably 10 more trends we can talk about. But again, for the interest of time let’s, I want to dive in deeper into this customer service and this ai. Let me go ahead with a new share here into a screen, okay? One moment.

Okay, so here we go. Pretty cool. AI tool called Dream Studio. And what it does is based on your prompt again, you’re a product developer, someone’s coming to you with an idea or you’re, you, you have an idea in your mind. In this case, I just put in here, you know, modern furniture, metallic, iconic, just I’m not a furniture designer, but okay. And I got four images, right? And then you can click into each and then refine it and look at other, develop other iterations. Let’s go ahead and click here and see what came up.

Okay? If I want, I can go into this tool and set this now as the main image. ’cause This is the color I like. And then create other branches and other variations, right? And again, based on this prompt, these four keywords, probably someone who’s in furniture design would be able to come up with some better terms here. So let’s try something else just to show you a live demo. If anyone wants to prompt anything, you know, please, please do put it in one of the chats. And whether you’re on Facebook or YouTube, LinkedIn or, or Zoom directly. But let me, I’m just kind of thinking on the fly here.

All right, let’s see. Let’s try by the way, I’m gonna focus on physical, you know, hard products here, but the same types of tools can help even design screens for an app or an online, you know, kind of software screen oriented product. Let’s let’s be creative here. Let’s imagine we were in like aeronautics or something. Let’s, let’s design something like, let’s have an airplane. I always like terms like modern, modern lighting. Well, lemme see, tech airplane. What else? What else? We could use colors, we could use other descriptors. Hmm, descriptors. It’s a little vague. One other descriptor. Let’s just go with that for now. A modern tech, super speed, multilevel, that might not be a good word. Let’s just do this airplane. I just did this one earlier and got the got the modern furniture, so we’ll, we’ll leave it there.

You know, for that example, let me shift over to the second demo I wanted to give on, on Jack George’s an elite customer service. And at Jack George’s, which is, you know, a 30 year plus old wonderful, wonderful product developer, handmade Italian leather bags, both for men and women they have an amazing policy of a lifetime guarantee and warranty on your item. Very rare, very rare offering. A lot of their competitors don’t do that. And they even give you instructions how to pack your bag and send it back. And if you check their reviews across the board on various websites on their, not just their own, even on Reddit, you’ll see people talking about how amazing and high quality the bags are, right? So they don’t get damaged or, or harmed, you know, too easily. But if they, if they are, you know, in wear and tear over time, these bags last a long time.

You send it back and they will without charge repair it for you, which again, is just a high level of customer service. And then they showcase it on their website. So it’s not like a difficult thing to get to if, if you need that attention. And to me, that’s, that’s, we don’t see a lot of that nowadays. We don’t see a lot of that. I think it’s a great opportunity. It obviously comes at a cost company has to evaluate if they’re willing to invest that cost, but that’s the way you keep loyal customers for a long time and get the kind of brand supporters and brand advocates that that every brand is searching for. And every product should be looking to you know, get those testimonials. We live in such a reputation management era, and people want all that feedback, but you have to take the good with the bad.

And if the feedback isn’t good and your product is getting too easily damaged, or it’s hard to get repaired, you’re gonna get some negative feedback. So it was a great, great work by Jack George’s to keep that up. And certainly not an easy level of customer care, customer service to to sustain. So let me go back to the core presentation here, and then I’d like to save some time the last five, 10 minutes for some questions and also a live walkthrough. Our lab here to showcase some of the items that we have in, in the actual lab. So we went over trends, again, key steps. If you’re starting out with a new product or just kind of considering, and you’ve already identified that there’s a need, you’re solving a pain point obviously you have to conduct some market research. Try to understand what’s the size and opportunity in your market, get some feedback from users, either of existing competitive products or of the types of user base that your product would speak to.
And then as we talked about earlier, developing a prototype and testing through your M V P. Similar for, for tech products and apps, it’s really a similar concept of, of market research. Sometimes it’s hard with, with cutting edge technology and cutting edge products because there’s not really existing solutions, so people don’t know they need it until it’s there, right? Much like many inventions we can talk about. Over the years none of us knew we needed a smartphone before we, it came into our hands and we realized, wow, this could really change my life. And so you’re not always gonna get through the market research, the understanding from people about like why they might need something. If your product is on that spectrum of really being like a new solution or not even a solution, a new innovation that speaks to people and, and changes their life in a way that they didn’t know they, they needed it to be solved or changed as we talked about, you know, market research, different ways to do that through focus groups, through surveys and just general analysis of the market.

Prototyping and testing. I’ll talk about this briefly with some personal examples. With our blind spot detector, noone, it was such a an amazing product. It actually never made it to market. We made it to market with Park zone Noone. We didn’t because there was extensive potential for liability. If that blind spot detector doesn’t work just once in a hundred times and someone gets into a bad accident, you’re on the hook, right? It’s like, what, what’s self-driving cars are going through now? Like, great, this works well, but what happens when it doesn’t work? Who’s on the hook? Is that company, Tesla, whoever it’s gonna be, Uber gonna go outta business because of liability, right? How do you mix smart cars with human driving cars and what’s, what’s gonna be the transition period there, right? So similarly, we had a blind spot detector and I, two of my best friends, Chad and, and Geo it was right outta college were, they were going to Florida and we, we paid them to put the blind spot detector in the car and literally sit there, one driving the other one taking notes for every time a car passed them, did the sensor pick it up, did it pick it up or did it miss it?

And literally for 15, 20 hours of driving back and forth, they they tested that product. And and yeah, that, that’s what’s, that’s what’s required with a just lock. Also, we had a great lock, but would it withstand a kick on the door? When would that lock break? So we had to do the, the old strength test, send it to labs that would hit a door that had the adjust lock at different levels of pressure and see when it broke. And then you had to show those results to Home Depot and the big buyers to say, Hey, our product’s not just a cool innovation, but it’s also strong, and it actually wasn’t strong enough at first, and we had to make the metal thicker in the catch part of the lock in order for it to hold the types of screws that you use.

What’s gonna happen in the cold weather when someone puts it on an outdoor gate. So we have to do a weather test in both heat, but especially cold to see when it would rust, and if that cold would allow the product to be more vulnerable. Basement sports is another example in terms of what kind of items you’re putting in a product that’s for kids. And as that plastic, are those items small enough to be a choking hazard, right? For, for younger children. And we actually failed a couple of those tests and had to continue to iterate failed by the standards of Amazon. And then that’s why I have some bones to pick with Amazon, but I get it. They’re trying to protect customers. And then you have California, which is its own beast in terms of the requirements it has for the kind of materials that they would accept, or the disclaimers you have to put on your packaging if you’re selling into certain areas factory audits.

And then, or is another whole area of of stress for smaller and newer product developers. You might make a great product, but if your factory’s not on the list or hasn’t been pre-approved, that big box retailer might not take you in. So that’s helping those smaller factories get up to speed and make sure they abide by certain standards, both ethical and otherwise so that everyone could be comfortable bringing your product to the shelf. So these are some of the things that happen in the early stages of prototyping and testing, testing, testing, user design, testing and feedback once your early product is there. And then just again, agile development, continuous, I’ll come back to this slide, but the agile process for software development and continuous integration, that’s what we do, you know, with kid coin, with time bot with basement sports, any good product you see out there in the market that you’re using on your phone regularly is going through this type of agile development process.

Constantly iterating. And this is part of product management. It’s like you’re managing an existing version, and in the meantime there’s a whole nother test server that’s testing different features, and then the concept of AB testing. We have a new feature, we think it’s good, we’re not gonna do a full rollout. Let’s do a rollout with a test market with some different, you know, user groups. And then that gets back to this slide of having different personas, different target user types, and, and really just building out these use cases. U usually using a flow chart, a simple tool like, like Figma or even just a chalkboard or a whiteboard, any whiteboarding tool. Zoom now has good whiteboarding tools. There’s many, many tools that offer whiteboarding and it’s, it’s literally just a flow chart. For example with a lot of our products, they’re for parents and kids and coaches, right?

So the use cases, or the user story is a parent moves to a new neighborhood with their two kids or family, and they don’t know what activities are available. So they find your, they go online and they do a search for sporting activities or fitness or recreation. They land on your site or your app or your website. Now they wanna understand what the options are how much it costs, who they can speak to, where there may be a free trial available. So that’s what I just described. There’s like a six, seven step really use case or you can write the user story and then look at your product and see if it offers a solution and an easy path for that user. Type that persona, which is the parent in this case to arrive at your offering, evaluate it, and hopefully keep moving down the funnel of actually signing up, or at least giving you their phone number or email.

Now they’re in your marketing groups marketing funnel for how you follow up and hopefully get them on board as a customer, or at least to the evaluation process, right? And that’s a different persona than than the teacher that’s looking for a solution for their classroom. Or the kid that you know, is 11 years old, maybe has their first phone and they’re looking for apps and games and things to do with their friends, right? So that’s a whole different use case. He’s already in at a birthday party or with a group of his friends and, oh, look at this app, cool. Something we can do together, right? That’s a very different user story, a very different use case. Maybe they need permission from their, for their parents or not. Usually for kids under 13, there’s some kind of permissioning that they may need. And every company you can see, you know, from Uber to gaming companies to Amazon are all going through that when they’re trying to appeal to kids. How do we make sure we have the approval, especially if they need to buy something and pay for it, right? So you need to build in all of these different use cases for approvals and integrating with other family members that are part of this, the buying journey, let’s say.

All right, just again, a summary of bringing, you know, new ideas and inventions to market. What problem are you solving for? First question, this is, if you’re coming to me with a new idea, I’m saying, okay, well what, what, what are you solving here, right? Can, can this be a profitable? Is that other people, competitors trying to do it? Is there any intellectual property or IP available here? Maybe we should follow provisional patent. And then how quickly can we get a prototype or a beta that we can test and do some surveys? We did it for a just lock before we even formed, you know, a, a full operating agreement in a company. It was the inventor, you know, and myself, you know, two co-founders getting in front of Grove Street over here in Jersey City with a little table, some free waters and just, Hey, get a free water if you give us five minutes and kind of take a look at our product so we can do a survey.

And we surveyed hundreds of people, got great feedback, we’re able to use that with, you know, to help convince investors to invest in the company because 87% of people said that they would prefer our product to the traditional lock. So that’s an early example of using your, your prototype beta to get feedback that could then help you get the capital needed and move forward with your product. And then continuing to iterate it by making the product stronger and strength testing and all those, all those other components there to hone in on your true product market fit. And again, maybe in a future iteration of this collection of, you know, product marketing, product management workshops will get into the product market, fit, the marketing and all of that, we couldn’t really cover all that today. Before you leave in the next 10 minutes, I’m gonna switch over to my phone and just give you a couple of other product thoughts with products we have in the lab here.

But definitely reach out to us at Blueliner. You see three different ways to do so here. Reach out to me directly or you know, Steve Powell, our, our VP of sales on LinkedIn, on Facebook, any which way through the website. We’d love to brainstorm with you. We’d love to have a meeting like this, or we can, you could present your product to us and we can give you feedback, audit, assess it, brainstorm with you on it. I am going to now switch over to another device. Please do submit questions at this point, if you have any. Here we are in the lab. I was talking about Exeter and Park Zone and I just actually installed this. So what this device does is imagine you’re pulling in to the back wall of your garage. You can see this little traffic light.

I’m actually gonna reset it here, see this button. This could be a battery issue. Let’s see, this little gadget called park zone was my first invention, co invention using a little Polaroid sensor down here. Hope there’s not a battery issue. That blinking red light usually means that. So you would mount this on the back wall of your garage and then hit this little button and it will blink. And then when the light goes off, that means you’re set. So see I’m using this little pad, imagine that’s the bumper of the car. And now here we are, we’re out of the garage, we’re coming home. You see that green light, you’re driving your car, you’re getting closer to the back wall, the light turns yellow. And as we said in our slogan, when the light turns red, you’re in the park zone. Cool little tool, I’m gonna leave it up in the office.

And by the way, when we did our marketing strategy at trade shows, we did just that. We put the park zones all over the booth and from there people would just walk up closer and back all day. And we got buyers from Brookstone, from Sharper Image, eventually into Sears and Kmart, all with this little gadgety item, which sold over $10 million in sales over the first couple years. Just coming over, and I’m gonna answer some questions in a minute. Just the kind of things we consider right in our product development for basement sports, we have a bat, right? We’ve got a blue bat. Here was another bat from another company, which you may have heard of called Nerf, a great brand a lot of us grew up playing with. And one of the early issues we had with our bat, with our bat was it would break a lot quicker.

So it was a product quality issue, right? So there’s always pricing versus quality and weighing how many things are you putting into your starter kit? Our baseball starter kits right over here. Again, that big box that I told you costs $15 to ship. So another early mistake on our part was having a package that was too big for the price point, right? So we’re working on, we worked on for the next product, making it a smaller package, one third the size, right? And much cheaper to ship. And that’s actually two sports in one. So double the efficiency, one third the size for the same price. So our next version of our baseball kit, we’re probably retiring this and we’re gonna combine baseball and basketball, but that’s another issue. Making sure, you know, the products can be efficiently packaged, but with this particular issue, the product quality, and I found out because my son and I would do little lightsaber battles and the orange bat always lasted longer than the blue one.

And this bat we’ve had for like three, four years. So kudos to Nerf for its product quality and for teaching us that we needed the similar type of P V C plastic to be made at a higher level of thickness. So that’s the kind of feedback and detail and attention to detail you send to your manufacturers, to your partners, right? Same thing with balls. Something as simple as this little foam ball, which is used for, for our Nerf basketball and baseball. And how much do you squeeze it before it loses its shape? And its roundness, right? So it’s like the thickness level. How heavy is it? If you make the ball too heavy, it could break windows. So as an example, this other ball we used for soccer, which I’ve had again for four years, we’ve kicked it around. Kids have done all kinds of things to this ball, but it’s somehow maintained its shape and it’s maintained, its its usability versus one of the early balls we had in the soccer kit.

Our soccer kit did not have the right level of, of thickness to maintain its shape and be actually functional in this kind of indoor environment, which is where we play basement sports. Same thing with the sticks, right? What levels of sticks do you need to have for an eight year old child? A 10 year old child, a 12 year old? What if mom and dad wants to play an adult that’s, you know, five, five to five seven can’t use a stick that’s this short, even a stick that’s this short. So it’s about testing it with a different age kids in your market and finding a solution to be able to extend, which is what we’re working on now, an extendable pipe that can go on so that you can easily create a stick with a longer length that can be more adaptable for different age kids.

And I can go on and on. You know, we decided to add this bag that’s actually very nice that can actually hold product once you take it out of the box. Now you get this nice bag, you want to take, pack the items and take it to a friend’s house, you get that bag. That was a very last minute addition to our product set and something that people appreciated having access to this basement sports bag, right? And it fits the sticks and the bats and a lot of things in it. And again, I can go on and on with our different products, but I’d like to take a couple questions before we reach the top of the hour. The last quick thing is this tape. A kind of tape that we use a lot to go on floors, you know, to mark lines and, and boundaries. And this tape, this actually wasn’t our tape, this was a tape from Adidas and amazing job. This tape has lasted, it’s coming off a little bit now, but it’s lasted a long time. So, you know, testing those kind of things, it’s like an, an obsession and incessant amount of testing to make sure you’re getting the quality you need at the price point you need. So with that said, I’m gonna take a couple of questions. We might have time for one here.

Okay, question, at what point can a startup start spending on marketing sales? What percentage of overall costs should be dedicated to those in the product rollout phase? Where’s the best bang for the buck? I think it’s a great question. Lemme switch the the camera around here and answer it. It might be the only one we have time for. So it’s a great question obviously that as we said earlier, when you have those initial prototypes, before you do a full market rollout, doing some either social media marketing or some really hyper-local marketing to be able to get an early audience to come in and truly consume your product, whether they’re paying for it or they’re getting it as part of some kind of focus group and really getting that honest feedback. Assuming you’ve passed that stage and you’ve now created your first batch of product, or if it’s a app release, now you’re ready to go to the formal market.

The app stores themselves, you know, in iOS and Android and the social networks like Instagram or great places, let’s say whether it’s it’s an app or a new product tech product, just doing a little Instagram ad, 1530 seconds, something simple and then you just target it. And that’s something we help a number of our clients do. Just some target marketing 15, 32nd clip, it’s gonna come there. They’re gonna see it in Instagram if it’s interesting to them and it captivates them. If it’s good marketing and messaging, you’re gonna get clicks, you’re gonna get clicks, you’re gonna get installs. I spend some money on, on new fashion companies sometimes I’ve never heard of. And you can talk to men and women all over. I think women more so for the fashion side and they’ll be captivated by things. And as we know, the algorithms are always watching what they’re interested in and we can leverage that to target market those particular items to the right audience.

And it’s, you know, you’re paying per click, you’re paying per install anywhere between, you know, $2, a dollar per click to maybe up to even $50 at the beginning. To your question about percentage of spend, you’re always gonna spend more money to acquire customers at the beginning. If it’s a new product or a new service. I wouldn’t worry about that. Worry about getting those, that initial hundred, that initial thousand customers to actually take your product and become advocates for it. ’cause They’ll start spreading the word. And your marketing cost per acquisition will come down if you have a good product. And then ultimately your percentage for marketing as a percentage of your revenue should get to 25% or less. But at the beginning it might be 200%, it might be a hundred percent, which is why we need funding at the beginning of our product launch efforts. It’s a pleasure having you all. Again, I promise to do this more often. Thank you guys for joining Facebook, Instagram, YouTube I’m sorry, not Instagram LinkedIn. Next time we’ll try to find a connection with Twitter and Instagram and other platforms as well. Thanks for joining. Enjoy the rest of your day and we will see you soon.

Blueliner CEO Arman Rousta joins Shahab Salemy, VP Product and Design at Dick’s Sporting Goods, in a conversation about the impact of digital transformation in product development, supply chain, and sports marketing. With a decade under his belt in various tech and product roles at Nike, which he helped transform into a digital first company, Shahab shares some best practices and war stories from some of the world’s top sports product brands. The old Columbia University Men’s Soccer teammates also discuss the Messi Effect and what it might mean for soccer and sports marketing in the U.S.

The video can be viewed in its entirety below, or accessed through the following, unabridged transcript.

[Note: the transcript was automatically generated through AI. We apologize for any errors or distortions.]

ARMAN ROUSTA:

All right. Welcome everybody to the Mout Project sponsored by Blueliner. This is Arman. It is Wednesday. Yes, September 13th, 2023. Losing track of time. I’m really honored to have one of my best and oldest friends, Shahab Salami, who’s been on an amazing journey that we’ll hear about today. He’s currently the VP of Product and Design at Dick’s Sporting Goods after a decade-plus stint in various roles in product development and tech and innovation at Nike. Shahab—what’s up, brother? How are you, man?

SHAHAB SALEMY:

Good, good. Nice to see you, Arman. It’s always fun to talk to you. I feel like every time we talk, I learn something, so it’s always a pleasure.

ARMAN:

Likewise, likewise. You know, we, we, we obviously took very different paths and we’ll, we, we’ll, I want to come back to that later, but you know, since graduating and spending, what, three years together at Columbia, playing on that field here we are. How many years later? Let’s not <laugh> what? 20? I lost track. It’s at least 25 years, right? Yeah,

SHAHAB:

Yeah.

ARMAN:

Where, where, where are you sitting right now?

SHAHAB:

So I’m down in Austin, my home for the last year. But yeah, just sit in my home office, you know, have my favorite Jordan 11s behind me, as always.

ARMAN:

Good stuff. Good stuff. So is your role with, with the, you’ve been at for about a year plus now, right? Yeah,

SHAHAB:

Yeah. A year plus. Been there about yeah, about almost 18 months or so. So I managed pro digital product design, which essentially kind of the backend work of everything that’s a digital product into our ecosystem. So everything from consumer facing things like the app, the website to tools that you’ll see in the stores of whether you’re interacting with it as a consumer, digital tools that we have, digital walls or tools for our associates in the stores, all the way to things that we use internally. So you can think about our internal website, our systems, our, what we use in the supply chain. So they’re, we manage probably a portfolio of maybe a hundred plus different products across the ecosystem. And that’s kind of our like, broader kind of mandate. And then on top of that, we’re like, we kind of manage and help co-create more of a transformational story as is going from really being a traditional sports retailer to evolving and be more of a sports related company.

And that’s a bit like how we serve our athletes. We talk about ‘consumers’ as ‘athletes’, and–instead of just providing product recommendations–we try to provide more of a service layer, to actually help them become better athletes. We’re early on the road, we have a few initiatives out in the marketplace but that’s where we see the future going, which is a much more integrated version of holistically serving that athlete of which product is a huge element of that. But the journey into product and what you do once you get the product, I think, is also interesting.

ARMAN:

That’s amazing, man. That’s really amazing. How long, I mean, I know you’ve been at only for a short time. How long has the company made this an initiative? I know with Nike, and we’ll get to that, it was, it’s been a long-term initiative. And how old is that initiative?

SHAHAB:

Well, I think it’s, so the, the, the vision of the company changing to becoming the greatest sports company in the world is only a few years old. So like that statement that was put out and publicly acknowledged is only a few years old. I think the work of how to get there is around that timeline. So I’ll use an example. You know, a few years ago we opened up a door that we call the House of Sport. And the mandate of that door was build a store that if it opened up across the street from us, would put us out of business. It wasn’t necessarily to scale that concept. It was more of like, well, let’s just see what would happen, what would you do? And so constraints were off. It’s like Cisco creativity was launched. What was built was a 200,000 square foot basically arena of sorts that has everything from climbing walls to half a football field to what we call the house of cleats, which is like every cleat you can imagine completely integrated.

And it became more of an experience for consumers to come in and to really engage in the whole journey of sport. And so whether you come in there to shop or you come in there ’cause you’re interested or you come in there because you want to actually try and play, it became an environment which to do that. And it was really fascinating because not only was that we, we learned a lot, but one of the biggest learnings we realized is it was actually exceptionally profitable to do this. So we went from that one store concept to, in the next several years, we’ll open up a hundred of these around, it won’t be as, not all the platforms will be that large, but the idea will still be the same, which is these environments that you can come into and experience sport in a different way.

And that’s one idea. And you could think about how we could bring that concept into a digital world. You could see how you could bring that concept in partner environments. You know, we have a platform called Game Changer that, you know, if you have a kid that plays baseball, you’re probably familiar with it, where we basically record youth baseball Yep. Sports, and provide that back to the team and to the parents. So they can track their kid, they can help schedule their games, they can watch their games. So if you’re 3000 miles away, you can see it. What’s fascinating about that platform is in a single month we have more data on baseball games than the history of M L B. And that’s just the, yeah, that’s the, the power of like youth sport and this idea of how much information we can generate. And there’s such a desire from both the per the, you know, the kid who’s playing the game, wanting to track their stats, how am I doing as well as parents in the ecosystem wanting ’em to support that place. So when we talk about sport, it really starts dimensionalizing what that means. And so these are, again, a couple of examples that over the years we’ve been going to, and it’s like they’re all little pieces of the puzzle as we go on this journey, but it’ll be a long journey. It’s not a, you know, this is very much a, you know, a a wave of transformation of the company. But exciting to be on.

ARMAN:

That’s extremely exciting. And I’m, I definitely wanna put an asterisk on that with you for game Changer. ’cause As you know, we have basement sports and it, there’s a lot of touch points, you know, where we have things like stats and streaming, and it’s more for really the in-home environment. I call it more like disorganized sports as opposed to like organized youth sports, like families bringing that concept into a house. And but I, and I don’t wanna take up this call with that, but I definitely want to put an asterisk and talk to you another time about that. ’cause I think there’s I love that vision and I completely share that concept. And I, I think about in other retail experience is how we see so many retailers fearful of, you know, Amazon and what these big online retailers, you know, have done to, to challenge at every level every type of more standard brick and mortar retailer.

And the answer always comes to mind. It’s about the experience, right? That you could have in the store that you can’t have if you’re solely buying online, or obviously it could be integrated, but there’s something that happens when you get into that little mini rock climbing wall or the experiences you talked about that it’s hard to replicate through augmented reality. I mean, we can try and put on headsets and that’s, I know, that’s part of the, the roadmap I’m sure for you guys as well. So amazing man. Amazing. So let me backtrack with your career, ’cause a decade at Nike, right? We’ve gotta talk about that a little bit. Nike, you said, you know, you talked about it a little bit in our pre-talk being like aiming for digital first to become a digital first company. Do, do, do they think, and do you think that they achieve that? Is that aachi? I mean, obviously it’s always waves, but Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, yeah,

SHAHAB:

I mean, I think that it’s I think directionally moving forward, yes. I mean, I think it’s a little bit, and I’d say this candidly of, you know, when I think about how technology plays a role in company’s journeys, there’s essentially three types of companies that you kind of think about their world of technology. There’s the digital natives, you know, Apple’s, Amazon’s, Googles, or the like, like they don’t really talk about a digital strategy. They, that is their strategy. It’s like how they do. And so it is the, it’s how they compete and how they differentiate. Then you have individuals who realize that technology is as much a partner of everything that you do, as much as merchandising is, as much as product is, as much as sales as everything else. And it’s seen on par because you realize the power that it can provide.

And then you have companies who still probably look at technology as it and kind of have more of a servant kind of leader kind of relationship with technology. That third chapter is the death zone. Like if companies who don’t appreciate that technology is on par with everything else they’re doing, and in some cases it is their value proposition, you’ll ultimately die a slow death and maybe a fast death depending on the industry. And the rea reason it is, is because it is su such this idea of how much technology integrates in everything we do, and it’s integrated in all the things we do is as real in the consumer space, as is in the business environment. So Nike realized this, and if you think about like the history of, you know, Nike, Nike’s gone on many waves of innovation and it has a great spirit of innovation and a change, and I have nothing but respect for the company.

There’s, you know, they’ve been, even when I was there early days, you know, there was almost 12, 13 years ago, there was a lot of digital platforms that the company’s working on, but they were very siloed in how to use this technology to help this experience. Over the last probably five, six years plus, it was more saying, how do you think about technology across everything we do and start integrating it? So this notion of whether you’re a footwear designer and you have an idea, starting in a digital environment has a lot of implications and benefits. How you deal with your, you know, your manufacturing partners and you can move to a digital environment really speeds the time of innovation. And once you get into your supply chain and how do you use technology, both track your product and make sure you have the right product in the right place completely elevates your game and obviously in the consumer.

And there’s a lot of elements. And so I think Nike’s done a, a great job of thinking about all those areas and really moving that. The challenge of any company that sits in the middle is because they’re not native. It is not the first thing that comes up, right? If you were to take an executive at Nike a few years ago and you’d say, tell me what it means to like, bring a product to market regardless of what function they’re in, they could tell you that. But if you were to ask them, tell me the technology that enables that, it would’ve been a challenge today. That’s different. If you’re executive Nike, just, I’d say if you’re an executive of any company that’s in that second brand, you have to, technology has to be a language that you’re willing and capable of speaking because it’s just as important those other elements.

So that’s why I think it’s the evolution, not only like a company like Nike, but many in the middle eventually won’t have this conversation. Hmm. Right. There’s this, like, this word digital transformation I think had a time in place. I think companies who continue to use it are on the early side of the curve because we have transformed. It’s not about a digital transformation anymore. If you’re doing that, you’re well behind where you need to be. Now it’s more of like, how are you utilizing the technology and integrating it more thoughtfully across the ecosystem, which is really the power, this siloed approach, which I think is how companies used to work is is also very challenging.

ARMAN:

Yeah, no, that’s interesting. ’cause Language is always changing and, and you know, like I know in your title and some of the history, it was, it was that like, hey, part of the digital transformation team at Nike, and so how do you, what, what, well what’s the next level of language? Like how do you describe what you do if it’s now past, you know, into that next stage? I mean, it’s just,

SHAHAB:

Well, I think, I mean, I think the word that, you know, this idea of, you know, transformation is not some that, that the single word is not gonna go away. And how you transform and kind of evolve and innovate is critical. So like, when we think about, I think about what we’re doing at, we don’t say we’re digitally transforming. You know, we talk about there’s this kind of evolution of transformation of the experience we’re bringing to the athlete. Technology’s a key piece of that, right? But it’s not something that we don’t lead with it for many reasons. One, because that’s something about where it’s mentioning before is like if we said, oh, we’re going through a digital transformation, it’s kind of, I think it’s a little bit historical way of thinking about what we’re doing as opposed to we’re trying to move forward. And I’d also say not every company needs to be at a moment of these huge inflections.

Like sometimes you just wanna do what you’re doing just a little bit better, right? And, but the idea of having thought and process of how you want to get better innovation should be at the heart of every company’s strategy in some capacity. So for us, you know, at is a different perspective. Like, you know, Nike, you know, when they, right when I was kind of leaving, going through what they call the consumer direct offense, this idea of being more thoughtful around taking a bit more ownership of their supply chain, opening more stores, shutting down some of their wholesale accounts because they’re trying to lean up, I think was a very viable strategy. And that’s what a lot of what they thought about. Since then, they’ve actually reopened some of the wholesalers appreciating the need to partner through that. But like I commend any company who’s willing to take some chances and to continue to try and elevate and evolve because, you know, the only thing we can’t do is stand still, right? There’s, there’s no you know, you’ll never win by not moving forward.

ARMAN:

Yeah, no, that’s, that’s well said, that’s well said. Is there I’ve got a few other topics here, but before moving on, specifically from your, your, your role at besides, you know, game changer and this amazing like concept store that you said is now looking to expand any other kind of trending or upcoming or current initiatives that you can talk about at?

SHAHAB:

I mean, not much that we can probably talk about, but I think, you know, it’s hard to not have a conversation about anything innovation and not talk about like, generative AI and like the, the work that will, you know, fundamentally transform. I mean, when we think about, you know, I don’t think I would say something that, you know, probably thousands are not saying right now of it’s the most exciting technology that’s, you know, comes since the internet. And some would argue even more exciting than the internet. And so this journey of how to really partner and use the technology and be thoughtful in a way that’s going to feel in some ways seamless, but all in other words, safe is something I think we’re all thinking about. And so whether that’s, you know, this idea of like the end of search and moving to a new way of search, so how we think about getting product, or if it’s a way of how you train individuals, or it’s a way of how you link systems in the backend, I think it’ll, over a period of time will fundamentally change everything that we do.

I think we’re just at such an early place right now that the best thing that I think whether it’s Dick or other companies can do, is really have thoughtful experimentation. And so I think that’s an, an area that’s very interesting. We’re spending a lot of time on it. And you know, I think if any company’s not at least thinking about it or having some folks dedicated to, it’s probably amiss what the future will be. It’s you know, if, if I was if I was smart enough to know that I probably would be here right now, but yeah.

ARMAN:

Well, I mean, like you said though, it’s part of that same transformation conversation in those buckets. It’s like that’s one of those forefront items that if you’re not even talking about it, if you’re only talking about it, you’re already a little bit late. But to be dedicating resources to working on experiments and, and in-house and with partners certainly makes sense. So let me ask you this, from the standpoint of, you know, working with partners, and obviously you guys are creating your own and acquiring companies and building your own in-house, but you’re also, I’m sure there’s a, a vast, you know, partner network including pro Nike and other great brands. Any, any advice or recommendations for people that might want to, you know, hey, how do we work with? What kinds of things are they looking for, maybe for, maybe for smaller brands? We know obviously working with Nike and big brands is gonna be natural, but how do smaller sports related companies, organizations maybe think about, you know, a couple of best practices to possibly? Yeah.

SHAHAB:

Well, I mean, I think so. I mean, formally, I mean, we have a fund, we have a small fund that we launched this past year. That, so there’s actually an environment by which if companies are interested, you know, we have a team that reviews the opportunities we integrate with that team. And so there’s an environment which we do invest in early stage companies and think about that we, similar to many corporates who have similar types of vehicles, our strategy is not to get return from that investment, right? We’re not investing as investors, we’re, we’re investing with the idea of how can we help support those companies going forward and ultimately kind of integrate and help them in an ecosystem that works for us as well. So I think as you, as companies approach, and I think like, you know, I’ve done a lot of business development in my past at many companies.

I think when you’re dealing with a corporate, I think really having a sharp understanding of what their investment strategy is, is critically important. Because there are companies who will build funds and they’re doing it to drive return. It’s a very different partner experience. You’re looking for different things from them. They’re looking, looking for different things. For you first a company who’s like, we’re here because we an early stage, you know, investment to acquire. Like when I worked in medical devices, most of the investments for in that direction that ultimately you’re using it as an advanced r and d arm and you’re kind of saying, we’re not ready, but you’re ready. Eventually when you’re, when you’re kept one or two milestones later, we will, if everything’s working we’ll, most likely acquire you. And that’s been like the history of medical device industries to grow through acquisition in many environments with a company like or in our world, it is finding that balance between an area that maybe is not our area of expertise, but could be directionally innovative or candid could just solve an existing problem that we’re having.

Because it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s so front facing, it could be very back facing. And so, like, you know, I was like, when I was at Nike, we invested in a company called IT Select that was working on really about like demand planning was their tool. And they’re using, you know, AI and ML tools to basically become smarter in demand planning. They had a lot of other customers. Nike just happened to be one of their customers. We learned a lot. We invest and ultimately we acquired that business. Why? Because we we’re like, you’re doing something we want to do and we, we want to advance that to your direction for us. So wasn’t, it was a problem the company had initially was a supplier, became an acquisition target and were brought in the same thing I could see happening. Companies like, where again, so it’s, I think the key is to work your way into whatever you’re doing, find that business partner within the business that is focused on that area Sure.

And get connections to them. They will usually be very open to express the areas they’re interested in. And it’s not about the long-term strategy, not really disclosing a lot as much as disclosing the needs. If you feel you can solve that need, then the conversation will naturally begin. And then different companies have different vehicles in which to do that. So whether it’s, you know, for us, we can invest, we can obviously, you know, partner on A P O C, we can just monitor, you know. So that would be my kind of like macro advice.

ARMAN:

Yeah. No, that’s great advice. And, and would, would you think, I know this may not exactly be your area, but would you kind of apply the same type of, of advice for a company not necessarily looking to get acquired or sell their technology, but just like a pure supplier into like the C P G? Like someone’s got some new sneakers or some something innovative, some clothing that has some technology built in or something? Yeah, yeah.

SHAHAB:

I mean, we, we do that. I mean, there, we’ve looked at companies where ultimately the, the question is we’re not gonna, we may just become that has become our part of our merchandising strategy, right? And so, and we have, obviously we have a huge merchandising organization that’s constantly looking at kind of what should be our assortment, what brand should we work with, how should that come to life? Part of, I mean, not, I won’t use names, but there are some of those companies that we have looked at from an investment standpoint. But ultimately the end goal may be we’re just gonna bring them into a merchandising environment in our store and have an elevated experience with them. ’cause It’s something that we think about what they’re doing that’s really interesting and innovative. And whether that’s to, ’cause we think we can sell a lot of them, or whether that’s, because we think it’s an interesting inroad to have people come to our environment to test that product.

Which we know if you get, you know, people into your environment, you have a much better idea of converting them. And that could be digital or physical environment doesn’t have to always be in store. So there are those elements, I think, you know, any, there’s very few companies that can do it alone, you know, and then the larger, the more complex you, you become, the more you appreciate the need to work with partners. You know, obviously we, as amongst everyone else has huge vendor relationships, but I’m, I’m talking about more partnership relationships and has a lot of, you know, opportunities and problems. And there’s a lot of really innova, a lot of innovation on the side, I think could make sense for us. But I don’t think, again, I’m saying, I don’t know if it’s a, it’s by definitely is not a one size fits all.

I think it’s, I think to your point of also, and not, I’m sure most of your entrepreneurs and folks that listen appreciate, like, ultimately they need to do what’s best for them. And so it’s a little bit of what are you looking for from the partnership? And whether that’s dollars or advice or distribution or, you know, whatever it may be, or customer you know, finding the people have the right match of what you need is by far your most important element. ’cause If that doesn’t work, it, it’s never gonna serve the company if you’re constantly pulling in a different direction from where your partner wants you to pull.

ARMAN:

Yeah, no, it’s, it’s gotta be balanced. It’s gotta be a two-way, a two-way street. And so listen, thank you for that and I, I want to jump into some other topics, but just take a moment to, to welcome anyone who’s listening live on LinkedIn. It’s a fascinating conversation with Shaab Salami who’s at Sporting Goods as a VP of product and design, 10 plus years at Nike. And also a very esteemed career track before that you went to business school as well, Shaab?

SHAHAB:

I did, yeah.

ARMAN:

And where, where, where’d you go to business school?

SHAHAB:

Wharton.

ARMAN:

At Wharton. Okay. A Colombian Wharton guy, double Ivys. You still playing soccer, by the way?

SHAHAB:

I did. I had our first match this for the fall season on Sunday.

ARMAN:

Awesome. This past day. Awesome. I, I, I, yeah, I want to get into to some of that, but again, anyone who’s listening, you know, please feel free to share it forward. This is invaluable advice from a seasoned technology and marketing executive. I mean, it’s a lot of just cross-functional areas, but seems to be, as Shahab has been talking about this digital transformation and his role for 10 plus years across two of the, the top firms top companies in the sports, sporting goods industry. So we’ll go on hopefully, I mean, definitely I’ll, I’ll, I’ll make sure we, we, we cap it, you know, before the top of the hour. But just to shift a little bit, some, some questions. First of all, what’d you think a little off the cuff about the movie Air? I mean, given your experience with Nike did, did you feel, and the executives and the people, you know, there, was it, did it feel like a good portrayal of, of the culture? Yeah, I mean, I think it

SHAHAB:

Was, you know, there’s there I I I, I, I’m blanking on the individual’s name. It was kind of a, a seasoned Nike alum who as the movie was coming out and viewing, he was actually on LinkedIn, like posting, here’s what was real versus what was not. And so it was a nice little flow of that. And I think there was, if I had, if I had to in reading that, some of which I knew mu much of which I didn’t I would say it’s like the story is probably like 80% accurate. And there’s, you know, 20% Hollywood, which I think is probably expected. I don’t think it was, you know, presented as a, you know, a true depiction of exactly what happened. But I think generally, I think it is, right. And I think it really spoke to the spirit of the company, which is, you know, to take risks, to innovate, to look for new ways of innovating or innovation is, is as the, as the movie depicted, it wasn’t just about product, it was about product, it was about branding, it was around the business model behind it.

All the things were different pieces of that. So, you know, it was as much of a, you know, a movie about business as it was about sport or Michael Jordan. And I think that is really the spirit of most very successful companies is that, you know, it’s not about, I always, you know, when I talk to members of my team when we’re, we’re having a challenge and like, never look at a problem, look around the problem. Because if you can, when you look at a problem, you sometimes you think about, you know, it’s one plus one, it has to equal two, and you just keep on trying to make it equal two. And the real big problems are never that simple. The, the reality is you have to kind of look around the problem and really try to figure out like, well, what’s really the, what am I trying to solve and how can I solve it?

And I think you think about like using errors, an example, their problem that the statement was like, how do we become more relevant and build our basketball franchise? It focused on an individual. But even when you focus on an individual, there’s multiple dimensions on how you’d have to do that. Like, well, what is his and his family’s intrinsic value? What, how do you want to present to them? Is it just about product? Like, what’s the brand around that? How do we think differently? How do you give some space? How do you take risks, you know, to the, you know, the, the notion of the movie when they talked about we’re gonna pay the fines to the N B A and we’re going like, we’re gonna do something that others wouldn’t do. ’cause If you looked at a problem, you could say, well, how do we make the best looking shoe that has this much white on it?

If you looked around the problem, you’d say, well, wait a minute, we can do something and we’re gonna get fined. But think about the brand recognition we’ll get and how that is really in the spirit of who we are. And so I think when I try to employ that with myself and with others to be, don’t be so myopic on what it is as much as allow yourself the time and freedom to ask why not, and to give some space to go do that. And I think that’s where the real innovation happens. You know, it, you know, if not, we would all be still going and, you know, renting DVDs if it wasn’t for Netflix. Like, I mean, there’s a, you have to think differently to truly kind of, you know, bend the curve.

ARMAN:

Yeah, man, listen, that, that, that movie, and appreciate what you’re saying there, this is definitely a case that’s like its own little m b a program could be built in entrepreneurship and, and, and brand building and across the board, so many lessons from that. And by the way, anyone who’s listening, if you have any questions for Shaha at the end, I wanna leave a few minutes for a question or two. And, and speaking of that, now transitioning from that, I mean, it’s like you said, it’s more than just about the athlete because in this day and age, pay per tweet, and every athlete has their agents and management and price tag, right? So there’s a lot of, I don’t wanna say cheap ways, but like, yeah, every, there’s just a price level, right? Based on the eyeballs and the audience, and there’s all kinds of ways to do it.

So that was one lesson, seeing what happened. And maybe that’s like a once in a lifetime type of thing, but now let’s talk about soccer and, and Messi, right? And like him coming over. ’cause We, we could probably just have a whole conversation, me and you on soccer and that, but this so-called Messi effect. I mean, what are your, what are your thoughts from a, I mean, as a soccer fan, as I know you are, but even from a business standpoint, how he’s doing deals in ways that aren’t generally done, and maybe it’s a generational talent that can do command that kind of value? I

SHAHAB:

Mean, I think the, the deals, I mean, I think it really comes back to if Messi doesn’t perform on the field, none of it matters. So if he were to come and with all the fanfare, and he’s not fundamentally turning around the team and getting people, no one would care. It’d be kind of a, it’d be a curiosity that we’d be an asterisk. And companies like Apple and Adidas and others, like, why did we do that? It’s really, so it starts with him. And I’d say like, that’s true of most things. Like the essence of who he is is in his talent and obviously his work. And that everything around him is what exemplifies that. So it’s not just the, the idea that he’s not only an amazing player, but he’s an amazing teammate. And I think that goes a few ways. It’s not only that his amazing teammate, but his style is so revolutionary that it makes people think differently about the game.

The whole, you know, the notion that everyone talks a lot about is like, you know, the, the Messi walk. Like he’s just, he’s barely moving. But when he does, but he is constantly examining this idea that people are playing many times against themselves in a game or against a history of a game. He’s playing against everyone in the moment is a valuation of how people are, are in the moment is a completely different way of thinking about, you know, soccer or mini sports than, right. So like, then you start getting into like the business side of it. I think it’s interesting, but I also feel like anyone could create that structure and saying to your point of like, you know, going to the, you know, the old days of like, you know, whether you talk about Jordan or you talk about George Foreman in the grill, or 50 cent in Vitamin Water, this idea of, of Fed more recently and on running this idea of like, my brand is important, but I bring more than just my name.

I want to be associated with it. And if I’m associated with it, I want to be part of the upside of that experience. You know, Federer left Nike four years ago, a bit more than that, signed a deal with on running, took 3% equity of on, on Goes public, his three percent’s worth 300 million that happened in three years, right? And like, that’s the idea of, he’s like, I am more than that, right? Nike wasn’t gonna give him 3% of Nike, which is a whole different ballgame. But my point of it is like, this notion of integrating more thoughtfully into the experience, I think is really an interesting way, particularly when, you know, you have that clout and that ability, right? Right. This is like the, so like the LeBron effect in basketball where he is like, he’s more than an athlete, he’s an icon. He wants to project of who he is and show that he’s can do more than just play basketball.

He wants to demonstrate what he can do in other environments and how he, his brand is who he was. And you think about someone like LeBron who was so conscious of that when he was 18 coming out on the cover, sports Illustrated, you know, the, the chosen one and through such a long career has managed that so thoughtfully. I think those are the things that are really interesting. When we look back on them, they seem so obvious, but you think about in his career of LeBron’s career or many other athletes who come up and we could, you know, talk about many in soccer who at a very young age, people were thought they were gonna be the one. I mean, we all may, the soccer fans, we remember Freddie Adu was gonna be the next coming for us soccer. And you think about how his career was so mismanaged, and now he’s moved in the wrong environments and part of it’s his play, but also the environment which he’s in, led to a very disappointing journey for him.

Well, at least in soccer, I don’t, I don’t know Freddy’s life, but anything about, you know, we, the, you know, Ronaldo going to Saudi Messi coming to the US and Bape staying in Europe. Like, they’re all kind of trying to think like what makes the best sense for them. A lot of it is around, I think, you know, like it’s easy to, again, in retrospect to think like who’s winning in that, but it’s also the re what they also talk about winning, you know, mess. He talks about his family, he talks about like, you know, Miami being much better for that environment. We know the next, you know, decade of soccer globally, the US is gonna play a huge role in that with Concor calf with World Cup, you know, this elevation of the women’s game in the us you know, now we have, you know, dedicated the, you know, the KC current up in Kansas City is building a first only women’s only stadium for soccer.

You know, that’s, you think about when we were playing this idea that we’re gonna, there’s gonna be a league for women professional sport for soccer, and then the teams were gonna create dedicated stadiums for that would be fanciful. And today, and I happen, I’m good friends with the owners of the KC current and you know, speaking to them, they’re doing it not just as much. Like they love the sport and they wanna promote the sport. They believe in the future of the game as an investment as much as anything else. They’re not doing it just philanthropically. They see the same opportunity of that. So, you know, the, the current Bay Area team is owned by sixth Street, so another colleague and friend of mine who owns that same idea, like they’re investing because they see the future of the game. And so if you’re Messi, now’s the time to come to the us. There’s such upside for soccer in in the us and I think he sees that, you know, in his third chapter or what you know about his career, what a great way to demonstrate, you know, he doesn’t need to prove his skills to anyone else. Okay. Now show he can, you know, transform a country around the game.

ARMAN:

Yeah, no, well, well said. And it’s, yeah, it’s interesting all the analogies you brought up and there’s hundreds more, and those are all great case studies and, and I think coming from you and where you sit you know, I think people should be really listening you know, closely to that. And, and just an interesting juxtaposition, obviously with Air and Jordan, it was like before the guy was proven and it was like taking a bet, you know, the, a bit of a gamble, whereas with Messi, it’s, it’s a different kind of risk like you said, but it’s obviously he’s a proven entity, but what he’s doing and the impact it’s having in the early days obviously it’d be great if Miami makes the makes the playoffs and we’ll see, obviously knock on Woody stays healthy, but I was in Bogota Columbia a month ago for a conference, and I did, hadn’t thought about it till I was out there because on all the televisions, I mean, they have their local league, but they were watching, and the locals in there in latam. It’s like we talk about soccer in the US and the us but it’s like, because Messi’s playing now, they actually are paying attention to the m l s for the first time. And there’s obviously a lot of Latin players already in the m l s very good players from the other countries in Argentina as well. But up now with Messian, it gives them even more reason to watch people were wearing pink shirts and the jerseys. So it’s like this effect is like a multi continental effect. Do you think it’s gonna actually elevate the level of play for US soccer at kind of a youth and, and yeah.

SHAHAB:

Professional level? I think everything and yeah, and I’m, I mean, I, I’m sure there’s others who better students of the, the, the game of soccer going through the us but what I would suggest is, you know, soccer’s still the number one participation sport amongst youth athletes. Like, and that’s been the case for many years. Like, it’s not a new phenomenon. The challenge has always been, most of them, or many of them are good athletes, they just happen to play soccer. They end up choosing other sports because they’re inspired by other athletes. They’re inspired by what they see on TV or whatever else. And I think what we’re seeing now is an ecosystem in the US where that young athlete, that six year old, that 10 year old is starting to see a hu both the level increase as well as the opportunities for them increase, whether that’s domestically, internationally.

And it’s fascinating. I was in Seattle a couple weeks ago and I was with my family there and my, you know, three young nieces and we went to go see UDub women’s team was playing Yale. The level of collegiate soccer I’m just using at the female level was so much better. And candidly, you know, going back to like when we played like felt competitive to what, like our style like 25 years ago. And you think about that, and so like now you have like my, I have nieces in high school and junior high and, and younger, they look at that and now they’re inspired by what the game can be and the bar is so much higher. And like, same idea, like when we now watch collegiate soccer or even the US has gotten, you know, the US 94 team, you know, couldn’t get a goal in against today’s team.

I mean, there’s not even a, there’s not even a comparison. And so I think that’s what’s really interesting is you’re seeing the level really rise and you’ve seen the opportunity also rise. And when you see those things come together, you know, when, you know, practice meets opportunity, like that’s when the magic happens. And so that’s why I’m optimistic of the journey. Will the US ever, you know, m l s ever compete with Premier League or like Liga or League One? Maybe not. I mean, it’s tough to, at some levels that’s, you know, generational. Generational. You have to, you have to get Messies to come here when they’re 13, not come here when they’re 36, right? But it’s, it’s gonna be a competitive league. The one thing the US always, you know, is willing to do is put money at the situation. So like, you know, we’re, we’re afforded a very stable, you know, economy and, and a lot of dollars to support the game. And just like I was mention alluding to before of like, investors are starting to put their money into the game, that’s a really clear sign of the fact that they see value. So I’m optimistic you know, I, you know, it would be great to one day see the US actually be competitive that our World Cup truly competitive and I’m, you know, it’s fun. You know, like I said, I, 20 years ago, I would never think about watching US soccer, you know, today it’s like, you know, every game’s interesting. So

ARMAN:

Yeah. Now, now you gotta have that Apple plus subscription. Exactly.

SHAHAB:

Well, yeah, I know every, every time I watch, I feel I put another few cents into Messi’s Pocket.

ARMAN:

Yeah, yeah. And like you said about the level of play, I mean, just look at some of the guys we played with who now have kids, right? Like the young Balsamo, the young Sullivans, I mean, Balsam’s moved to lacrosse, but they’re, you know, the, these great athletes we played with. Now their kids at the next generation are like you just said, another notch, another level above. Just look at what, you know, Brendan’s boys are doing, and talk about possibly some of the future of the sport for that young talent, those 13 year olds staying in this country or staying connected to, to the program, whether it’s national team and or maybe some club ball. I mean, maybe for the chance to play with or against guys like mess.

SHAHAB:

I mean, you think about, you know, in, you know, last World Cup, like when the US put their, you know, 11 on the field in the first team, I think 10 of them played in Europe, right? So like this idea, like even like the US game obviously is also getting better because players are going and getting great experience and coming back either national team or maybe a bit later in m l s. So I think this fluidity that we’re starting to see, I think is also helping the global game because we also know like different leagues have different styles, they have different players. Like you’re starting to, it’s not so, you know, I remember when like Landon Donovan went overseas and one of the reasons he came back, I think to la he said he was homesick and like he wanted an environment and like, that’s great for him.

It’s not a criticism, but this idea of like, it used to feel very foreign Yeah. In all walks of life to like, I’m gonna go overseas, I’m gonna be in a place. I don’t know, I’m, but now with this idea of how our, many of our cultures have started to come together in many ways, and this idea, it’s not very, it’s not hard to kind of see yourself in multiple environments, I think has also allowed young athletes that luxury of thinking about how I can now expand my reach and not feel so pressured that that doesn’t put, didn’t challenge my personal goals with my professional goals. Right? And I think that’s an interesting dynamic as well that we’re seeing. And that’s, you know, we’re getting into like whole other dimension of like how athletes are getting paid and, and the flexibility have, and you know, we could spend an hour talking about n i l deal deals and how like that’s changing the game and right at a younger level and giving people more options and you know, where they play and how they play and how they promote themselves. And so it’s a, you know, it’s a fun time to be in sports. You know, we could talk about sports gambling. Yeah. We talked about Aaron Rogers, Achilles. I mean, we,

ARMAN:

We can go in a lot of directions. I want to, I want to have you back on, I know you guys got a busy schedule, but actually a couple things. One is, that’s one of the questions I saw a couple questions streaming in and I’m save it for the end, but since you mentioned N I l I’ll just throw it in now. Any advice you’d give, like potential, again, going back to partners, vendors, or just even those young athletes, like for this, like utilizing n i l athletes in their marketing?

SHAHAB:

I, yeah, I, I mean, I think, and again, I would be wrong for me to give advice to any person individually, but I w if I were to give like, some general advice is like, you know, realize every athlete is a brand as soon as early as they start playing, like you are a brand, whether you have an N I L deal, whether you don’t, how you, the style you play, how you promote yourself on the field, how you promote yourself in your community, all those things really matter. And so when we think about, and again, using LeBron as the example of an easy one, but his thoughtfulness about his brand at every moment, how he was gonna be perceived, what partnerships he was going to sign, a lot of it is very, it’s very curated and thought because it wasn’t about such and such is gonna give me X amount and I could do y it was about how am I thinking about the long game?

And for really the great athletes that’s so, so critical because as we know, we, you know, we’re a fickle community. We love hate our athletes just as quickly, you know, we, we put them on pedestals and we knock ’em down as fast as they, we, we, we put them up. And so that association of who you partner with is really important because now as we know, like n i l is, it’s a, it’s the Wild West rules change every year. Who, what’s really true, like what can you sign up for all those things you have to stay very on top of and be very thoughtful about that and also appreciate, like, once you do put your name on something, now you’re associated with that brand in some way and you think about your longer term career, how should you be thinking about that? Is that a brand you want to be thoughtful of?

Is that a place that makes sense for you? Because ultimately, and I think that’s where I’ll go back to partnership is so important. When you find the right partner, all the other stuff, candidly becomes easy finding the wrong partner and you’ll spend your time. I, you know, I’ve done a lot of m and a and business development. I always tell, I always remind myself, and I always like tell others when I’m doing deals is pick your partner, don’t pick your deal. You know, we spend so much time negotiating contracts and like clauses and out clauses and all these things, and I’m always like, that is, I understand it, we pay lawyers a lot of money to do that, but to me it’s a lot of wasted energy because if you pick the right partner, you will find your journey through those tough times. They will be with you, they will renegotiate, they will work with you if you find the wrong partner, it doesn’t matter how tight your deal is, they will find a way around it.

They will, could be a thorn on your side, they will counter sue. They, you’ll have this a horrible journey. And so you think about n i l you’re essentially entering into all these micro partnerships. So think about not only the brand and the dollars that you may achieve, but really think about is this someone that you trust? Is it an environment that makes sense for you? Is this a place you think you could potentially grow? And oh, by the way, if you outgrow them, will they understand that and appreciate that? Like, hey, we’re a point in time partnership. You’re now a different kind of beast that I think is as important as, you know. And again, it’s easy for me to say, I don’t know what everyone’s situation is. You know, I, it’s, you know, your, your environment may be different that forces you into different places. But that would be my kind of general thinking of n i l. Yeah,

ARMAN:

No, that’s, it’s, it’s really good to hear from you on that. And so I, I take it has a a, an active and proactive strategy in that space. It’s not like a let’s watch and see or is it how <crosstalk> Well, I think,

SHAHAB:

I mean, we’re aware of, I mean obviously, I mean you have to know, I mean Dick, you know, and Nike are very different. We think about, you know, Nike has a lot of n I l you know, athletes, but Nike’s business model is very much a is an athlete driven business model, we have, you know, athletes as our ambassadors and sport, but it’s a different model. So it’s not as relevant in a environment as maybe in a Nike environment where, you know, the thousands of people are working on finding the next great athlete and how early can you partner with ’em and what does that deal look like is is very different in the, in that world than let’s say.

ARMAN:

Gotcha, gotcha. Great. Well my last topic for you, and this could be brief is and we’ve talked about a lot of different names and athletes and I know as per your time at Nike, and I’m sure as well, you’ve come across and got to be at some of the best sporting events and meet and greet, and I’ve seen some of your pictures with the different athletes. Any, any one or two that you can share that were like, just either your experience or who you found to be just fascinating to meet or that was personally like touched you in some way?

SHAHAB:

I would say, and I, and I didn’t spend a lot of time with this athlete, but I’m, he’s by far my most inspired athlete of, you know, for me the last, you know, could be my like adult generation who would be Eliud Kipchoge, who you know the Kenyan runner who has, you know, on professionally has, is by far the, you know, most prolific marathoner our generation maybe of all time. You know, he has demonstrated inability, the only man to run sub two hours for a marathon, not on a professional course, but in a curated environment. We had worked with him on that journey and have been, Nike has been a huge supporter of Kipchoge for many years from early running to to where he is now more of an ambassador and he still competes. He’s competing in Berlin coming up.

I think what I’m, why I think he’s so inspiring is one, obviously his physical abilities are just so aspirational in terms of, not that any of us could do that, but just his ability, he talks about this idea that you really have no limits, like, and, and to test that theory. And so this idea that, you know, once upon a time we thought that, you know, no one could break the four hour, you know, mile mark or they would die or like women couldn’t run marathons. And these kind of ideas and his idea to constantly test that idea, two hour marathon was conceived as one of those ideas and his ability to say it’s possible, and he hopes in his lifetime it’ll actually be achievable by many. So that on one side is incredibly inspirational. His, the way he shows up to the community of running, you can think, like running sometimes can be a very individualized sport.

You don’t really think about it, particularly with marathoning. You can kind of think about it in terms of it’s one person versus a clock in many times in some athletes. But his concept of how he’s built really a collegiate environment of running both, you know, in his own, you know, home in his country of Kenya, but also how he’s become an ambassador to others and really thinking about it as a community, I think is incredibly inspiring. And he’s also one of the most humble human beings you would ever meet in terms of how he lives his life, how he prioritizes his family, how he realizes like you don’t really need much to be happy. You know, happiness really comes from inside. It really doesn’t come from anything else. For all those reasons, it’s he’s like at the top of my list of, of that, you know, I’m, I, you know, love a lot of other athletes for different reasons, but holistically it’d be Khashoggi.

ARMAN:

That’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that Shahab, and, and really thanks for taking the time. You know, we’re, we’re, we’re longtime friends and as I was joking in the post today, like the only way I can get get in your calendar is to do do a podcast with you. I know, I know how busy you are. Hopefully I’ll come down at some point. It’s, it’s great that you’re back in, back in Texas, man. How’s it feel to be back home or close to home?

SHAHAB:

It’s great. Yeah, I mean, I, it’s Austin’s a great town. You know, we’re, we’re coming off the summer heat, which is, you know, always the, the challenge of the Texas summers. But yeah, no, I mean, excited to be kind of central and, you know, close family and yeah, it’s a, it’s a good experience. So far.

ARMAN:

Good stuff, man. Well, next time you’re coming up to New York, let me know and otherwise maybe I’ll get down for a cowboy game. How, how about them cowboys, man, <laugh>. Yeah,

SHAHAB:

Yeah, yeah. I, yeah, yeah. You know, put, put the 40 nickel on on the Giants. Yeah. It was a good match. Yeah. Well, I’ll be, I’ll be in New York for the, the marathon in November, so. Cool. I look you

ARMAN:

Up. Alright man. Listen, thank you for your time. Appreciate it and have a great rest of the day.

SHAHAB:

All right, sounds good. Thanks everyone. Okay,

ARMAN:

Peace.

The August installment of Blueliner’s 2023 workshop series focused on AI and the related area of marketing automation, showcasing some practical examples of how small teams can leverage this rapidly-developing resource to increase productivity and customer satisfaction. The workshop also examined the vitally important area of reputation management, and spotlighted some industry-leading tools and select AI that can help with this process.

The video can be viewed in its entirety below, or accessed through the following, unabridged transcript.

[Note: the transcript was automatically generated. We apologize for any errors or distortions.]

All right, welcome everyone to the Blueliner Webinar Workshop. We are starting to do this once a month here. This is our August workshop. Today we’ll be focusing on using AI and automation to grow your business. AI has been used for a number of years in growing all the different SaaS tools and marketing tools that agencies like us and small businesses have been using for some time. It’s only this year where it’s really crossed a certain threshold and really grown to a point where it’s becoming more mainstream, more accessible. Obviously, chat, G p T and what’s happened just in terms of content generation has become a huge source of efficiency and, and exploration for people. And I’m gonna be showcasing some examples of using AI and marketing automation, as well as with a particular focus on reputation management and how small businesses and service providers can increase and improve, you know, their online reputations in, in an efficient way. And that includes, you know, medical practices, restaurants, product, consumer companies. Really almost any and every type of business is, is susceptible and really subject to reputation management nowadays.

So, first and foremost AI in the marketing space is again, something that’s been used. Saas tools, like things as simple as MailChimp Twilio, how to just send an automated alert or reminder to a client about, let’s say if you’re a gym, just reminding people that they have appointments and booking set simple tools like that, intelligence tools letting people know, giving them opportunities to engage special offers. Thank you for coming. Thank you for shopping tools of that nature. Help users and customers better engage with the brand, follow up and give, give a more chance and likelihood of a repeat repeat purchase or repeat sale, and a referral as well. So it just, with all the different tools and all the different opportunities to market both online and offline, using AI and automation effectively will help you streamline and save time and gain efficiency if you’re able to use it the right way.

Right? So AI is transforming marketing with, you know, data-driven insights and automation. You can use AI power tools to personalize, you know, content and optimize your campaigns whether they’re paid ad campaigns or organic campaigns, personalizing customer experiences and growing your business, you know, faster is, is, I would say the number one benefit of using and exploring AI and marketing automation. And again, the big trend that’s happened this past year with AI is it’s all become more accessible. For example, I’ll show you a couple of examples. Not just for content, but also for image generation, video generation, generation of, of presentations, proposals, things of that nature. One tool, for example, that I use to develop this presentation is a tool called Canva. If you haven’t heard of it, definitely take a look. There’s a, it’s a freemium product. There’s a free version. And I think as a matter of fact let’s go ahead and come out of this core presentation. I’d like to demonstrate this because talking’s, one thing I think demonstrating the use of tools is another, let’s come in here into Canva, canva.com.

It’s really a fantastic tool. Think PowerPoint, think Google Slides. And I’m sure you know, Microsoft and Google are working on similar, similar features. So Canva great for, you know, designers, but also people that aren’t designers that are looking to design anything from logos to social posts to videos. In this case, let’s let’s stick with presentation. So coming in here, creating a presentation for your business. Let’s say you have to give a speech at a conference. And what would the topic be? So Canva has different kinds of templates that you can use. If you have your own content and your content is ready to go, and you’re just looking for a good, good stylized design and graphics, stock images, which can take a long time to, to find online in general, all of that is built into Canvas, especially the premium versions, like thousands and thousands of different stock images and videos. But in this case, let’s say we want to go beyond that. Let’s say we’re not just trying to create a design, but we need some help with content. So let’s come up with something. They have this new tool called Magic Design built in into Canva here, where you describe the presentation you want, and we’ll do a draft. So what should we do here? Let’s say maybe something with health and fitness. I’m really just thinking off the top of my head now. Okay. How to,

How to train for a marathon. Let’s maybe do some little more general, how to get fit and lose weight in 30 days, fitness and nutrition program. Now, as I write this, and if you’ve used OpenAI or chat, G p t you’ll, you’ll come to know that the, the more descriptive you can be, the better, you know, using keywords. Again, this goes even to ss e o and search which has been, you know, hugely affected by, by the onset and the new tools available in ai, being descriptive and as descriptive as possible, and then seeing what’s generated, right? And then, you know, tweaking that, playing with that. So, let’s stay right here. I think this looks good. How to get fit, lose weight, 30 days fitness and nutrition program. Hit enter, and we’ll see what comes up in Canva here.

So it’ll be the same content in all of these eight squares, but this is really now more designed. So I could, and you could kind of like preview a little bit of it, if you like those colors, if you like a more minimalistic look, which looks like this. Not a lot of colors. Usually I like to get more immersive design. Okay, let’s, let’s pick one and move forward and go with this guy. So there’s the design. Let’s create the presentation

And just quickly looks like nine slides. Just kind of see what came up. Present this to the device here. 30 days to a Healthier You, a fitness and nutrition program. Okay? There’s the goals. Set specific goals, create a plan, track your progress. Again, I didn’t write any of this copy, I didn’t pick any of these images. And I’ve got now a nine slide presentation taking us through. Incorporate cardio, increase your strengths, set, achievable goals, a bit of the nutrition plan, stay hydrated, rest in recovery, setting goals, staying motivated, tracking your progress. Not too bad, not too bad. Now, of course next steps. I think this might be the last slide, right?

And that’s the last slide. So let’s come out of this presentation if we can X out. And then of course, as anything, you can come in and adjust the content and the copy come in here, change up the images if there’s an image, you know, you don’t necessarily like, and that’s one good, really, you know, quick example here about just using, using Canva. It’s a tool. I’ve, I’ve looked at this over the last, you know, couple of weeks, a number of different tools. I think this is the one. There’s also another one called Dream Studio. I won’t get into that. But I was actually working on a particular new product designed with some of our actually industrial engineers and designers. And we were using, or I was using Dream Studio to, to basically communicate what I wanted. And it really generated very, very good results.

And, and I won’t get into the details, but in a particular new apparel, a new product that we’re developing. And so me not as a non-designer trying to communicate this kind of futuristic style of this product, and just using a lot of different keywords and describing them, I was able to generate some excellent I images that I was able to then bring to the team, the actual industrial engineers and product developers that can kind of take it forward from there. So these are some of the ways that the non-technical, non-skilled professionals that have ideas and you want to communicate your ideas, can use these kind of tools effectively.

So let me go back to the core, the core presentation here and back into presentation mode. And by the way towards the end of this presentation, I’m gonna talk to you about Blue Liner and the agency and, and about some new ways we’re, we’re reshaping our services around being able to support small businesses that wanna incorporate more marketing automation, ai and, you know, specifically and particularly in tools and areas like reputation management to improve their, their relationship with their customer base. So, we’ll talk about that. And if you have any questions along the way, specific problems or issues you’re facing, you know, for those that are tuned in on LinkedIn or whatever service you’re accessing this live stream on, or the video and follow up, please, you know, put it, put a note in the chat and I’ll leave some contact information at the end for you to be able to reach out, you know, with your particular, you know, challenge or issue or question.

You know, in this space, it’s such a new space, you know, that we have to, that’s why we’re doing this type of education, this type of conversation. We have to explore this stuff together, right? And it kind of reminds me of when SEO started years back, and we were one of the first agencies, you know, in New York to really take that on and, and shape that service. And what does it look like and what are the benefits it feels, that’s what it feels like with AI now. It’s like something new. Everyone knows they need to try to understand it. They’re not always quite sure where to start. And that’s, you know, that’s part of our job to kind of get out ahead of the curve, ahead of the focus and, and, and help people realistically bring it into their practice. So here’s just basically some tips on how to get started.

Let’s, you know, try to find some processes in your business. Doesn’t even have to be marketing. It could be stuff in finances, could be billing, it could be, you know, just follow up, thank you letters to, you know, partners and vendors or just internal communication with staff. How, what are those different processes and, and how can they possibly benefit from some form of automation? And then researching tools such as the ones share started to share, and we’ll continue to share in this presentation with you. Most of the tools are available for free at some level, and then at a more advanced premium level, there would be a cost. So everything I showed you with Canva, there was at a free scope and scale, but then some of the more advanced tools, like getting better stock videos and pictures would come at a premium cost.

And then, yeah, yeah, starting small and then growing, gradually implementing across the different facets of your business. Not to overwhelm the team. And this is something interesting, I mean, in, in our agency and our group overall of about roughly about 40 people, including staff, full-time staff and partners that we work with, there’s this conversation about bringing AI into coding and into, I mean, there’s a whole movement of low code development happening as well. And in a future podcast in the next couple of months, I’m planning to bring in some of the, some of the top experts in low-code technology to the table, maybe to, to debate some of the, you know, our, our purists and, and hard coding programmers. There’s this concern and this question about ai, it’s like the, the billion dollar question, is it gonna displace workers? And, you know, what are the ethical ramifications of bringing AI into, into our lives, you know, personally, professionally.

And it’s, it’s a huge question. I mean, I don’t have, I don’t think anyone has the exact answer. I think we have to see, like any technology it’s happening. I mean, I don’t think there’s really much of a force that’s gonna be able to stop it from coming in. Now it’s just a question of how do we use it? Who uses it? And, and what impact that has on, on teams, on, on, you know, the human beings that were previously doing certain jobs that might be able to be replaced by ai. But I, I really, personally, and in our team, I’m thinking about it less, less as a replacement and more of an enhancement. How do we take the core 40 people? We have, we’re always looking at our development team, 10, 12 developers and saying, how can we achieve more faster? And we don’t have the budget to hire an extra 10, 20, 30 developers.

We’re a small business, like most companies and entrepreneurs run small businesses, right? How do we take the people we have and arm them and equip them with tools and these automations to be more productive, more efficient, right? To be, to do better customer service and content and follow up without having to manually be in every conversation if there’s thousands of conversations to be had. And that’s the way I think about it. That’s the way we’re implementing it, you know, across Blue Liner in our agency. And we’re looking to bring that same level of everything we learn and efficiencies to our clients. One more anecdote and then we’ll jump into the reputation management portion. It’s you know, meeting with a small business owner recently at a local Jersey City restaurant. So many needs. The list of needs that they have in terms of marketing and, and operating their business.

They need new pictures of the food. They need different, you know, types of follow ups on their social media. There’s email, there’s all these areas, and they have no one in house that’s handling that. And the people they were working with, you know, previously, hopefully, you know, will be us next just weren’t as dependable and reliable. So you could, you could see the pain that these managers and small business owners face because, you know, they feel they don’t have the budget to get all the help and support they need. And that’s ex, that’s the nexus. That’s the point where you use these automation tools and these ai and, and that’s the nature of what I was discussing before, agencies, you know, like us finding ways to use these tools so we can actually provide more service to more clients without breaking the bank for them and without having to spend hours and hours on end for us. ’cause If we have to spend more hours, that’s more time, that’s a higher bill billable rate to the small business that can’t always afford that. That’s the friction that can be solved using these tools.

So let’s talk and shift a little bit of the conversation to reputation management. Then we’ll work in how we can use marketing automation tools and AI in, in certain cases we can. And in other cases, there’s still gotta be a human touch. I’m still a huge believer and always will be. And that nothing can really replace really true conversational, you know, human touch, whether it’s in person, on the phone or through even chat, right? And email. And, and even when it’s ai, there’s gotta be a human being and a human voice, and a tone and a sentiment that trains that ai how to talk. It’s just like training a new person in your business, the senior person, the vision person has to train the new customer service rep, or the new staff person coming in on how to, how to handle certain situations, right?

And they’re usually more effective at it. So similarly, you’d have to train either a person or, or the technology system you use on how to respond. And online reputation management is about influencing how people perceive your brand online. It’s important to monitor the feedback. Of course, there’s always gonna be some negative review or some bad experience. How do you deal with that? Usually that’s the one that stands out quite a bit. And we’ll talk about some strategies and some things we do with restaurants, with our tour operators and hotels, as well as medical and wellness practices that we have, have worked with for years to help them in, in this particular area.

This is a great quote. And this is one of the tools, by the way, that’s worth looking into: Yotpo.com. Take a look at it. It’s, it’s a great reputation management and marketing automation platform. And there’s a nice article here that’s linked from this deck. And by the way, for anyone, again, who’s tuning in and if you want access to this, not just this, this whole talk, but the actual deck itself, the Canva deck please let us know. And there’s link here to a nice article about the debate about whether to incentivize and how to incentivize reviews and referrals. There’s rules. The FTC has different rules and legislation about it. And then Google and all the big tech platforms look to enforce some, some stronger than others. How, how they monitor that.

So something certainly to be careful about. But this goes it’s just a clear quote. Most shoppers need to see what they’re getting into before they buy a product. You know, whether it’s an online purchase on Amazon or, or a restaurant you’re gonna go to, or a doctor you’re gonna see or bring your child to, if it’s in the pediatric space. So this is very clear and concise piece of data there. And I think it’s obvious right but’s still worth talking about. Briefly, why is online reputation management important? It’s gonna impact the customer decisions. Negative and positive reviews could determine whether someone’s coming, making that booking or not. And then the importance of monitoring and responding to reviews which can be laborious and time consuming. And that’s where we can use some automation and tools to help us.

And monitoring your company’s reputation, which is also different, and we’ll get into it from your individual, the individual professionals that work within, let’s say, a medical practice or whatnot. So there’s two levels of reputation, the brand and business overall. And then the particular providers within there might be some high review and highly rated providers, and some not as highly rated providers. Like, think about an insurance network and think about even just a hospital or a medical practice. Not everyone, a tea teachers in a school, right? So there’s different levels, and there’s two levels of reputation management at the brand company level, and then at the individual provider level, or even a subgroup within a company. It could be a third tier, but either way, you need to track across multiple touchpoints. It’s not just always on Google, for example, or on Amazon, right?

Sometimes people are talking about your business or you as a provider in platforms that you don’t, you’re not even aware of. I remember recently was sitting with a fashion brand client that’s, you know, over 30 years old, great products, great overall reviews in general. And they were not aware of major, major conversations happening about their brand in Reddit, which is obviously a very popular forum and content network, social network in a sense. But it’s a place people go to talk openly about different products, different services, and they weren’t aware of it at all. So we, you know, rallied that in. You could see all these arrows here. It there’s forums and blogs and different social sites. It’s good to know what all those are and where any brand mention or conversation is happening related to your brand. And there’s social listening and monitoring tools. Like, like Sprout. We were using one called Ario recently for our World Cup sports marketing campaign with basement sports. Which was very helpful to monitor any mentions of any of the teams or players that were playing in that tournament. We wanted to know about it and know who was having a conversation where, and how we could engage the conversation in order to interject the offer we wanted to make. So similarly to promoting a new product, you want to have social listening and awareness where these conversations are happening related to your brand.

Responding, you know, to reviews in a timely manner is essential and important. We’ve got a medical brand, a couple of practitioners in the orthopedic space that do this very well in New York City monitoring all the reviews, right? And then, you know, seeing a lot of healthcare providers and medical offices are seeing hundreds of patients sometimes a day. So we’re gonna talk about a few strategies to engage that, because that’s a lot of traffic. And there’s, you know, the doctors are busy seeing the next patients, just like doctors don’t have time for the billing, and they have a staff for that, that same staff oftentimes, or by working with an agency marketing partner like us, would work with that staff to build into their workflow as much automation as possible for that process using tools like BirdEye or like deductible.

And there’s others that I’ll talk about as well to streamline that process for both the positive and the negative. Obviously, when there’s negative reviews, the whole, it’s like any, anything in PR or reputation management. Part of the goal is to quote, unquote bury the negative reviews by having more positive reviews than negative in a more recent fashion. Because a lot of times it’s date, date specific when they, when the negative reviews get pushed down by more fresh positive reviews. But again, let’s address the negative as well. You’re never gonna have a thousand percent, a hundred percent satisfaction rate. Or you might, but it’s, it’s, you’re gonna have to address whatever the issue was on that day. Maybe people had to wait a long time ’cause the office was crowded, or if it was at a restaurant, it was, you know, just some bad food that came spoiled food or, or whatever it may be.

Someone got sick, maybe for, for a variety of reasons. There’s always gonna be a down day, you know, a cloudy day. How do you address that? Says a lot about a business, right? So, along those same lines how do you ask satisfied customers to leave a review? Some of the best practices to be used, whether it’s at an office or at a restaurant, or really any location, is just good signage. Good signage, using QR codes, right at the point of sale, right at the point of service. And just encouraging them. And this is where the incentive can come in, okay, leave us a review and get, you know, a free drink or $5 off your next meal. Again, that’s that line that the FTC is talking about in their research and, and you’ll hear about it. You can’t buy reviews. I mean, it’s a difference between incentivizing people and encouraging reviews.

You don’t know what kind of review they’re gonna leave, right? It could be positive, could be negative, and you can’t say, leave us a positive review and you’ll get some discount. No, leave us a review. Get the discount. And usually that’s gonna turn out in your favor because you’re, you’re offering something. There’s also and again, Yapo has a good case study on this, on their website in the article that will link to about a food company that worked with them. And it’s you know, just using a loyalty program or a points program, that’s another way to build retention, build loyalty, build your fan base, right? And encouraging them to put reviews with pictures or videos. You know, nowadays you don’t need a professional camera crew to come film testimonials and videos. It’s just grab a smartphone. When the patient’s leaving, if they’ve had a great experience, if they, they have a smile on their face, they want to shake hands or give the doctor a hug or, or, you know, meet with the chef, give a compliment to the chef, take a picture with the wait staff with their food, what, whatever.

Again, the service is, we’re, we’re focusing on medical and food a lot. ’cause We’ve been working with that a lot recently. But it could really be anything, a product and unboxing right on Amazon that always works well. And other product related websites, walmart.com, Costco whatnot. So reviews with pictures and videos certainly increase trust. So you wanna encourage that. And referrals are even better if there’s a way you can, you know, encourage and incentivize people to hey, refer a friend. So having, again, this is where automation and tools come into play, building your workflows to automatically set up. Why should someone put their phone number in? If they’ve been at your restaurant, and if they came through, let’s say GrubHub or some online third party service, how do you convert that now, customer of yours to into your database, into your c r m?

That’s a huge conversion if that can happen. ’cause If it doesn’t happen, you know, and you run, let’s say a sushi restaurant in New York City, they might forget what that restaurant was. Next time they won sushi, they go back to GrubHub. They’re not, they might not remember where you were, what your name was, but they were your customer. So how do you convert everyone who walks in that door and you do it through these QR codes? These offers, these deals to get some piece, whether it’s an email or a phone number or a social connection some piece of that consumer’s information into your system. Now you can work them through your own marketing automation program, right? And then sharing that positive, those positive assets and graphics on your website, on your social media, and also encouraging them to do it as well.

Another great way to build loyalty is like, Hey, you share a post of any, your experience at our, at our service or at our experience on your own social network and tag us and we’ll give you some kind of offering or loyalty points for that. Those are some of the best practices for good. And obviously for the bad, addressing those negative reviews, someone had a bad stay at the hotel, it was noisy, their, their sheets weren’t clean, or whatever it was. Address it. Address it right away. If there’s some issue there was whatever the issue was owning it, right? Not necessarily always making an excuse, not making excuses, owning it, letting them know. And other people that are reading those negative reviews know that, that you care, that you’re on it, that you’re appreciate, you know, their feedback and that you’d love to win their trust or, you know, have them back. And, and that’s it’s more important to spend time on, on the negative reviews, but you wanna spend time on both. And again, that takes time and effort, which is where some of the automation tools can help have, you know, a handful of stock responses, scripted and stock responses, but that are authentic. And then empowering whoever’s on customer service to be able to add a little personalization or customization. I think that’s a nice balanced combination of leveraging some automation and some AI with, with some personal touch as well.

Again, we’re talking about, you know, healthcare and wellness practitioners a lot, and I, I mentioned this before, but it’s important that both the organization and the practitioners follow up and, and have some purview, some overview on all the touchpoints where they might be getting reviews. So for example, you know, how many platforms can you manage? Doctors are reviewed on zocdoc, on vitals, on health grades in other places, Google reviews and all of that should be, should be looked at by somebody. And it’s gonna be very hard for that to be the doctors and practitioners themselves. They need support from their staff. So we spend a lot of time training and working with the staff, also speaking with, with the providers, because sometimes the issues and the feedback relates to, you know, bedside manner or some outcome that wasn’t favorable. And you actually do need the doctor’s feedback on what happened.

And they, they can come in on occasion into these platforms, not that you want to take. I mean, there’s so much privacy when it comes to healthcare and hipaa that having these conversations live on Google kind of, you know, goes against, you know, patient privacy and, and, and situations where you want to address the concerns. So there’s definitely a fine line and a nuance, and that’s, that’s an area that we spend time working with, having workshops like this with, with our clients at BlueLine with our, with the providers as well as their support staff. And we become essentially an extension of that support staff. So how many platforms can you manage? Well, more, if you use some of these automation tools like particularly we use BirdEye with the practices I was mentioning before in New York City. It’s two orthopedic practices.

And again, there’s thousands of patients that walk through that door. We have all the, the email addresses, the contact information, and on occasion on a periodic timetable, we’ll put those emails into the system into BirdEye, which will then automate a message from the doctors to the patients, thanking them for, you know, their business and their visit, asking them how they’re feeling, and then asking them if they feel up to it to leave a review on one or more of these platforms, whichever ones we feel we would like to see more feedback on. And so how much time do you spend on it? And who’s best suited to do it? Well, I would argue it’s a combination of the support staff of medical or health practice working in conjunction with a qualified, you know, agency, you know, like, like ours to oversee this service because most of the time that support staff is very busy with billing and other types of patient care responsibilities, which are vital and which do impact, you know, the patient reviews as well.

And the best tools, I would say, again, I can’t claim that we know every single tool in the market every day. There’s new tools apparently coming up currently, the three that I’ve mentioned in the call today. Bird eye deductible we’re just starting to use with a new practice we’re working with. So I can’t give a ton of feedback there, but the early indications look really solid. And then YoPo, I know it’s a funny, <laugh> a funny name, but I’ll, I’ll show you the websites briefly as well before we end the the workshop today. Let me actually take a minute right now to do that since we’re on that topic, right? So this is BirdEye birdeye.com, over a hundred thousand local brands and businesses, right? And again, even things like web chat are things where you can build bots, build responses, that’s ai, that’s marketing automation, integrating with social. So I won’t go through it, you know, beyond that, just quickly show Verdi show also deductible.com, mostly focused on patient and, and, and healthcare.

And you can see all the different solutions. And again, all of these things, these patient engagement reminders, smart messaging, voice reminders are forms of automation that save time of someone sitting at that desk having to pick up the phone and call the 30 patients that have appointments tomorrow. This is where we’re able to save time through again, these these practice management and reputation management tools. And before I was showing you and talking about this, this great article on yopo.com that’s talked specifically about incent ins and outs of incentivizing reviews. But on the whole YoPo has, you know, whole combination of loyalty, s m s, email marketing platforms or modules so to speak. You know, I wouldn’t sleep on MailChimp either. Mailchimps are known as an email platform, but they’ve added Ss m Ss, they’ve added workflows.

And it’s really evolving MailChimp into a more of a full scale CRM, right? And there’s just a lot of crossover between CRM, loyalty management email and ss m s platforms, but it’s all, you know, under this field that we call under a lot of different names. Loyalty marketing, retention marketing platform. I like that, that terminology actually that they’re using. So these are three that we have some experience with that I would look into. And again, MailChimp. And there’s one that’s escaping my mind that we’re using that I’ll try to remember before we end the the presentation overall us getting back to our presentation, which is almost over again. Any questions come through, please please let me know. I’ll leave some contact information right here. And I want to take a few minutes here at the end just to talk about you know, blue Liner.
We’re in our third decade of service. Again, we were one of the early, one of the first digital marketing agencies, you know, in New York City back in 2000 informally. And then 2001 to more formally as an agency working for all types of small businesses from you know, pet kennels and, and spas to medical practices, to restaurants, to hotels first starting in and around New York and the US and eventually, and, and to this day now internationally working, having worked with thousands of companies. And a trend that we’re seeing is that, you know, again, a lot of small businesses are just strapped. They’re strapped on capital, strapped on cash, trying to find creative ways to grow, and they have much more to do than what they can afford to pay for. And it’s now, this gets to political issues and socioeconomic issues.

It is a challenging time for small businesses, and depending on the state and city you’re in, some are more favorable than others in terms of, you know, incentives and tools that they offer small businesses to, to be able to survive and to succeed and thrive. And so we’re very focused on that. We’ve, we’ve found ways, we still have enterprise clients and do work that is more costly because it is more custom and more elaborate. But recently, we’ve really, in the last two years, started to drive down and create these packages and starting at a thousand dollars a month that, that manage a number of services, including everything we covered here today, reputation management, social media strategy, using marketing automation to build your c r m and build your customer list through various social channels. That obviously all culminates into some kind of web design and web site that can contain and attract and store all of your customers, right?

So websites, sometimes people think, oh, websites are outdated. Now we can do everything in social media. Absolutely not true. I would argue with that all day because social media is vital, but at the end of the day social media changed their, you still don’t own it, right? You, you, you manage the content on that platform, on Facebook, on Instagram, that business can shut down. That platform can ban your profile for whatever variety of reasons. You know, it may not be your preferred platform, your own website is something you own. So you always wanna keep that as the central piece. That’s the sun in your digital marketing universe and all the social profiles and all these other review sites or, or the satellites or the other planets. They’re all, it’s all important to the ecosystem. And so starting at a thousand dollars a month, and obviously going up from there, depending on the needs we’ve, we’ve really recrafted our, our service levels and tiers to be able to come in and, and be be your CMO, come in as your outsource chief marketing officer, have those monthly meetings, have those weekly reports, create the dashboards that everyone needs to see to understand where the trends are, where the opportunities are, and and what the progress is from all the different tactics, including ss e o and search, marketing, paid ads, all the seven pillars as we call them, of digital marketing being addressed.

And what are the priorities working with your in-house staff, working with the owners, and becoming an extension of your team. So we’re available. You could, you could catch us or, or reach out on the website here or give us a call and we’d love to at least have a 30 minute to 60 minute meeting. We do free audits and initial consultations to at least give you ideas and some recommendations on what we would do and what we would do if we were in your shoes running your small and, and, and growing business or practice. So we’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear from you directly. I hope you found this presentation useful. And if you have any questions at all in follow up, feel free to post it in the LinkedIn message area. And otherwise in follow up, feel free to email or call us with any questions you have. Take care, everyone. Have a great day.

Join Arman Rousta and The Polymath Project for a conversation with Noam Gamady, a multi-disciplinary bio energetics practitioner, on the subject of health, wellness, and healing.

Noam combines several powerful holistic healing disciplines – including NVC (Non-Violent Communications), Feldenkrais and Bio Energetics – to help groups and individuals get in tune with their mind-body connections in order to heal old wounds and open up growth potential.

The video in its entirety can be viewed below.

Blueliner CEO Arman Rousta teams up with Steve Powell, President and CEO of Presidents Council, for a discussion of sales and marketing trends in the field of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs). In collaboration with The Polymath Project, they explore the buying process for large chain retailers and the steps companies can take to successfully gain market share, including initial contact, follow up, negotiations, line reviews, price quoting and more.

The video in its entirety can be viewed below, or accessed through the following, unabridged transcript.

[Note: the transcript was automatically generated through AI. We apologize for any errors.]

ARMAN ROUSTA:
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to The Polymath Project. Today is Wednesday, August 16th. Wow. Coming to the end of the summer, 2023. Hope everyone’s having an amazing summer. Really excited to invite and have on today, one of my longtime colleagues going on a decade now, and has also become a good friend, Steve Powell, CEO, and President of President’s Council. Hey, man. Welcome.

STEVE POWELL:
Hey, Arman. Good to see you.

ARMAN:
Likewise, likewise. I like your background, man. You’re out in Florida, right?

STEVE:
Jupiter, South, south Florida. Yeah. It’s terrible here.

ARMAN:
Yeah. Hot.

STEVE:
No, no. I’m kidding! It’s a beautiful place. This is, this is not, obviously not where I’m sitting, but it’s nearby. So it’s a peaceful little background that I like to use on things like The Polymath Project, which I’ve been watching for quite a while. It’s really nice to finally be a guest.

ARMAN:
Yeah, man. Listen, now we’ve been wanting to have you on, I know we’ve been working together for a while. To give the audience some context, Steve and I had first met . . . it’s gotta be a decade ago.

STEVE:
Eight years actually. Yeah.

ARMAN:
Yeah. I, I think, yeah. We started at one of the startups that I was involved in Ajustco actually, our first, you know, b.labs pilot project had a neat little product called the Ajustlock. We didn’t have any relationships with the buyers. We knew we wanted to be in Home Depot and Lowe’s, and all the big guys went out to the National Hardware Show, came across Steve and President’s Council. And man, I want the audience to hear from you. Tell us a little bit about the background. I know Presidents Council helped us get on the map and meet the people we needed to meet and learn a whole lot about what we needed to do better as far as packaging and process and all of that. So it was a tremendous education, and I think your organization obviously did a great job for us, and I know hundreds of others. So give us the background of Presidents Council. How did it start? What’s your role in it, and what do you guys deliver? What’s, what’s your value proposition?

STEVE:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it, it is a bit of a convoluted, convoluted business model that you know, I, I’ve had I’ve had girlfriends before and their families that think I’m a spy, because it, it, they, I guess they kind of tune out what I’m halfway through, through the explanation. But basically we are an organization within the global home improvement industry that brings buyers and sellers together. And the way that we do that, for the most part, is we have great relationships at the senior level with most of the major, pretty much all of the major DIY home improvement stores worldwide that are big enough to take a full container shipment. So it, it really started back in the, the late eighties as a place for the presidents of companies that when you’re the president of the company across the supply chain chain, and this is just in, in home improvement for this, but it’s, it’s true across any, across any industry that, that the president is the company’s basically looked at to have all the answers.

And this was really a chance to bring the presidents in, in, in a kind of a more of a networking opportunity to talk about solutions to, to, to shared problems, those kinds of things in a non-competitive environment that was across the supply chain, so that we did conferences and seminars and things like that, where it was, you know, that we, we provided some good content. This is back in the eighties and nineties. And then the networking opportunities for sure, we took the concept to Europe, which is where the commercial part of it started back in 1988. That was Don Miller. Miller Powell and Associates is the controlling company for Presidents Council. Anyway, so Don went over to Europe, and he was coming in as Presidents Council.

I think most of the people thought he was somehow affiliated with, like, at the time it would’ve been H.W. Bush. So he got meetings with most of the major—at least in DIY—you know, president CEOs of, of the, of the major European retailers who were very interested to talk to the Americans, because the concept of big box home improvement really kind of started here. It grew out of small hardware stores and lumber yards, and evolved into today what we see as the hardware stores evolved into the co-ops, the lumber yards kind of took a divergence. Some of them ended up being the pro store, some of ’em, some, some ended up really turning into the, I mean, Lowe’s and Home Depots and, and, and, and that thing of the, you know, those type of, those type of stores.

So shortly thereafter meeting the Europeans that we, we came to the the National Hardware Show, which at the time was in Chicago with a company called Castorama, who was I believe it’s still either number one or two, or number number one or number two in France, and walk the show with them. They wanted us to see what their challenges were. And we realized right away that walking in here, we have, you know, one of the biggest retailers in the world, and we’re walking into a trade booth, and the, the, the supplier is looking over his shoulder, looking for his local rep. He has no idea the opportunity that stands in front of him. So what they really wanted to do was be able to make these trade shows more effective and efficient for what they were trying to do, identify the companies that not only had interesting products that would sell in their markets, but were interested in selling into their, you know, into their geographic markets.

So our buying day program, which is kind of our base level program for Presidents Council for bringing buyers and sellers together, started as international. And then once the hardware show divided back in 2007, it moved into also more domestic. So we do six to eight of these events a year. It’s kind of, you’ve been through ’em, Arman! It’s kinda like speed dating for buyers. We have all the buyers. Through our relationships at the senior level, we’re able to bring in an entire buying team, whether it’s at their offices, sometimes the trade show, it’s whoever’s there, you know, covering the trade show for ’em. And you get you know, 20 to 30 minutes to, you know, present your company, your marketing, your products, your, basically get your compelling reason to buy out there and figure out what the next steps are.

And we, we really manage straddling the line between buyer and seller, making sure both parties are happy with the end of it. And, and really what that means for the supplier typically is that you leave with a, with a, with a clear indication of, do I have an opportunity here? And if the answer to that is yes, what are the next steps? And we instruct the buyers and the merchants to that, that is what they need to be able to, to to tell them, oh, and if there, if there is no opportunity, identify the obstacle. That way the suppliers can go back and change and, and figure out what they want to, you know, if they can, if they can make changes and re-approach. ’cause Now they have the contact information, their indirect contact. And if not, just quit wasting time with it and get on with your business and look for sales opportunities elsewhere. So we also do some consulting on a very limited basis for companies that are typically looking to either come into this channel from like sporting goods or grocery or something else where they have a product that crosses over or crossing over geographic borders where we’ll help Europeans or, you know, south America, wherever, get into the big retailers in Canada, US a bit South America and, and Western Europe.

ARMAN:
That’s amazing. And, and I mean, again, I could speak from firsthand experience to say that the value proposition is absolutely worth it when companies, especially newer companies are out there spending thousands of dollars, going to shows, doing various forms of marketing, other others of which are very important too. But ultimately, when you’re going out to a trade show, like we were, you’re really sitting there for three days hoping to attract in Yeah. Or trying to get that buyer from Home Depot or Ace to come to your booth. And that’s not always a guarantee. Even if you’ve had some email and you’ve told them, we’re gonna be here, and they said, yeah, well, we’ll stop by doesn’t mean, you know, you might’ve, you might’ve gone to the bathroom or out to lunch, and they stop by and that’s it. You, you don’t, you don’t get to meet that person. So to have that meeting is invaluable. And I know for a just lock, and particularly it got us into Home Depot, Canada, so I could speak on firsthand experience there.

STEVE:
The trade shows I think are really great for and, and I mean, every, I’m not poo-pooing trade shows at all. I think they are an invaluable asset to our industry and others. Problem is they’re huge. And one of the, the really good things that you can do at a trade show and really what the, I think, I mean, these days, what is, is really your existing business and, and making sure that those buyers come in and, and you’re, and you’re forwarding, you’re showing the new products, you’re, you’re cultivating that existing business, maybe some old context. What we do really is kind of reverse that, where instead of the suppliers waiting for the retailer to come around, we sit the retailers down at a table and the suppliers come to them. So you’re definitely gonna talk to them, I think, and that tends to be better for, you know, pioneering new, you know, trying to find new businesses to actually make sure that you’re sitting down with them.

And then, you know, you still have to do the trade show after that. You, you’re, you’re, you’re cultivating that and you’re, you’re working with the existing business and and, and moving those conversations down the line. But yeah, that’s, that’s the reason we do these events. We do ’em at the National Hardware Show, at the Cologne show is called the Eisen, Warren Messa, which is basically a little bit bigger than the National Hardware Show, but in Germany that’s a little bit more global. And then at retailer’s offices we do five or six of these per year, whether it’s the ones we’ve got upcoming are Menards in November, it’s November 9th. You can visit presidents council.com to take a look at if you’re interested in talking to Menards. And then Europe’s leading d i y chain, which is kingfisher, the, the major brands, B N Q and CAMA for that.

We’ll have that next month at 26th in Chicago. They’re, they’re bringing their sourcing team in. So yeah, we do a bunch of those a year. I yeah, that’s there’s a lot of different ways to get started. Ours is a little bit different. And, you know, for our industry, I think there are, there are some other organizations that have kind of used that model. I think what we do really is, like I said, again, straddle that line and make sure that everyone is satisfied rather than if it, if, if just a supplier is handling it, it tends to be a little bit too skewed toward you know, what they want. When the retailer, when it’s just on them, they tend to, to to cancel a bunch of meetings that they probably should at least have a to. So it’s our, it’s our job to kind of straddle that line and make sure everybody’s happy. Well,

ARMAN:
I know that, you know, again, from, from firsthand experience and in helping, you know, startups deliver products into, into markets where there’s already existing players there’s always a protectionism, right? Like the brands that are established that own those planograms, they don’t like to see new companies coming in, trying to slice out, you know a square of their, of their real estate, you know, of their revenue, right? Yeah. And so while you’re always hearing from those VPs at the top, at, at like the big stores, we want innovation. We want innovation down the chain. There’s a lot of resistance, there’s a lot of friction that we’ve found. So, yeah. Do you agree with that?

STEVE:
Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and, and that, that is where our relationships come into, into play with, at the, at that senior management level where when we, when we’re scheduling these buying days, it’s hard to get buyers to actually just clear their schedule for a day, especially all of ’em at once. And it really takes the VP of merchandising to say, Hey, everybody’s gotta clear their schedule. We’re looking at new products today. And then even in our, even in our project work as we are helping suppliers, you know, we might do a 12 to 18 month, you know, project with a European supplier coming over to the US where we’re actually taking ’em into the offices and sitting down with the buyers, and the, the supplier is, is working with the, the the buyer and following up. In the meantime, I’m following up with the person that we help, you know, the VP of merchandising to help organize these meetings, to kinda help through that process where, you know, things may change. A buyer’s gonna come in and try a, a new buyer might come in and try to change things up just for the sake of changing things up.

ARMAN:
That’s the other thing. The buyers are changing all the time. Now, before we go further, Steve I’ve got a couple of really good questions in mind. I also want to be remiss if I didn’t mention and welcome anyone who’s joining us from LinkedIn live. It’s something new we’re trying to do, just to kind of offer in the middle of your workday if you’re, if you’re on the East Coast a little bit of material, you know, over lunch, something hopefully thought provoking that could stimulate ideas and help you, you know, in your business in any way. So, welcome to any number of people that are joining us from LinkedIn live, otherwise, you know, through Zoom and, and whatnot and other channels as well. So, thank you and welcome to the audience. And if you have any questions for Steve in particular, we’re gonna be here within the hour for sure.

Please just submit them through the comments in LinkedIn. And, and I’ll, I’ll try to get those questions relayed to Steve here. So with that said, Steve so it’s a very interesting position to kind of straddle that fence. You’re seeing all these ideas. Some are good, some may be not really so good or acceptable. I guess the market will determine that. And then you’ve got these buyers and VPs that are trying to encourage them, Hey, bring me something new. Let’s find innovation. So what, with that said, I’m sure you’ve seen and you’ve kind of gotten a pulse about like, hey, you’re hearing from buyers what they want to see. Like, do, do you get a lot of that? Like, Hey, we’d like to see more tech solutions, or we’d like, like so that you could cater. Then what kind of companies you try to put in front of them do, do you get that kind of input?

STEVE:
Yeah. One of the things we do in each one of the buying days is, ask each one of the buyers to fill out an evaluation. And it’s pretty simple.

ARMAN:
Beforehand or after the fact?

STEVE:
After their meeting. And really it’s on a level of interest to one, from one to five one being, this was a waste of my time, five being, these guys are really good, we should be able to move forward. This, and this is before you’re getting into the price negotiations and all that kind of stuff. So this is just, you know, was this, you know, was this 20 minutes worth of your time? Was, do you think there’s an opportunity here? And over the course of, oh my God it’s what, 25, 30 years? We’ve been tracking these things and like I said, it’s, it’s, some years is five of ’em. Some years it’s eight of them. It’s about 53% that are fours and fives. So every 40 minutes a supplier or a buyer is seeing something he’s never seen before that he finds really interesting.

And, and where it goes from there, you know, know, we’re, we’re working on, it’s a registration fee for the event. We’re not getting commissioned. So we’re not, we don’t really necessarily know what happens other than anecdotal things. People saying, Steve, you got me in, in Menards, thank you so much. We don’t, we don’t get a whole lot of that. But yeah, that’s more towards your question about, you know, what’s, what’s happening in the industry, you know, as far as not just product, but trends. A lot of what’s happening, especially very recently with the global supply shortage that happened, you know, what was it a year and a half ago, a lot of major retailers, especially from the US and Europe, are looking to diversify where their products are coming from. So they’re looking to get less dependent on Asia because they kind of figured out they had too many eggs in that one basket, and when there was a disruption there, they left ’em outta stocks.

And that’s lost sales. Yeah. As good as home improvement did through the pandemic, they could have done better. So that, that has been a, a, a real big trend if you’re, if you’re producing or even stocking product in either the US or Europe, somewhere outside of Asia, there’s a, there’s an increased recent bias towards those kinds of products, just, just for the simple fact of, of diversification. And it’s not necessarily having to take over their number one, you know, if it’s, if you’re trying to sell, you know, any major category through Kingfisher, you might not be their primary source. They’ve got sources all over the world and they but you may be a secondary source where they’re gonna be able to, to carry your product on, on some kind of a basis, and then be able to ramp up into larger things when there’s outta stocks and things. Like, they just wanna be able to balance their, their, their supply equation a little bit better.

ARMAN:
Right. And, and you wrote a, a, a very nice thought piece on this that we shared, you know, with our audience you know, over the last couple weeks where you had these, these five trends. So that was the first one. Can you maybe touch on some of the others that you see here? And we could, we could wrap about it as well. ’cause I know some of them entail, you know, marketing and, and omnichannel and things of that nature. But yeah. What, what are you seeing over the next few years here? Obviously that trend has already started, the one you just mentioned with the, with the sourcing. What, what else do you see?

STEVE:
Yeah, I mean, the other one that, that, that nobody wants to talk about is the, is the, the theft problem that is, that is popping up. And more and more retailers are getting really concerned with this ’cause they have very generous refund policies. And I mean, every week you’re hearing on the, if you, if you listen to the news, you’re hearing about, you know, somebody that’s gotten busted trying to, doing some kind of a scam with, you know, returning stuff to Home Depot that they didn’t buy and, and things like that. So that’s a, it’s a bit of a political thing as well that Right. You don’t want to get too far into it because we don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future. But it’s definitely a source of hand wringing for retailers. The other one really is the sustainability that, that, that keeps coming up.

And this is something that again, this could get political yeah. But for, for the moment, it is it, it’s customer driven and more of a marketing than a, than a, if it, if it becomes law, then it’s gonna be completely different. And, and but the, the, the, the, the basic solution to when people say sustainability, ’cause it’s not really all that well defined yet. There are kind of, it’s that you can look at it as the, the, the waste from the packaging and those kinds of things that, that are pretty easily solvable, at least Sure. From if, when the, when the retailer and the, and the supplier are working together to try to reduce some of the things. If you look at Europe as an example, customers can leave the packaging in the store and the retailer has to do with it.

So they’ve been reducing packaging for years over there. The other yeah, I mean the the other issue with if it gets down to trying to find the providence of each particular component of each product, which it did with lumber a long time ago. Yeah. I don’t know if you remember that there was a group called the Rainforest Action Network. They would be protesting Home Depot stores back in the late nineties and stuff. They were demanding. And this is kind of what, where the, the, the further the, the further side of this go is, is demanding that providence and it’s tough. The, the, the, the suppliers aren’t really a, they don’t really wanna share that with the retailer necessarily ’cause Right. They’re afraid they’re gonna go around them and try to get to their source and just Yeah. Competitive

ARMAN:
Advantage.

STEVE:
Yeah. And, and b, they, it’s it’s difficult to measure ROI on on sustainability, which is not all that well defined. So the retailers are, it, the solution to the, to the providence thing is to really be able to, to really integrate the, the, the supplier and the retailer in, into where everything’s coming from. And, and it’s a, it’s a massive undertaking. I think that’s gonna have to become law. Yeah. To really kind of push through. On the, on the other side of it, on the lighter side of it, where you’re just kind of trying to deal with waste and pollution and stuff. The retailers are gonna do what they always do. They’re gonna push all the responsibility down the suppliers and say, you guys handle it. Yeah. It’s, it’s coming. You might as well, which

ARMAN:
Is a lot, which is a lot of pressure, especially for the smaller suppliers. I mean, if you’re a bigger supplier, you might be able to, you know, absorb that in some kind of way. And, you know, you have your department that could study that and figure it out. But for smaller companies, I mean, that could be, that could be a crushing blow.

STEVE:
For the bigger companies, how do you measure it? You can’t measure against loss or against increased sales ’cause it’s a marketing expense, but it’s almost damage control marketing. So there’s not a real obvious way to, to measure that, which is tough for, for companies.

ARMAN:
I think, I mean, my 2 cents on that, and this is a way of kind of like, I don’t know if it’s straddling the fence. ’cause I mean, I definitely value the issue and support the concepts of just kind of sustainability and, and just yeah. Take, take, let’s take care of the planet, right? Yeah. while we’re doing business and making money and doing all the things, which is all fine. Let’s also take care of the planet within reason for each person’s responsibility. I think the answer, part of the answer is it’s, it’s brand centric. If you want to build a brand that’s all, like, I, I got some shoes when I was in Milan last year when I was in the airport. This, this very cool brand, never seen it before. It was like European Italian brand called Bogie, B O G G I. And I was like, there’s a cool store, and I got some sneakers and some other things. And then their whole packaging inside talked about how every part from the lace to the rubber to everything was like where it was from, and kind of what you’re talking about there. And I mean, look, I didn’t buy the sneakers necessarily because of that, but after I got them, I was like, oh, this is cool. No wonder these sneakers were 20% more expensive than I thought.

STEVE:
I mean, that’s the rub, right? It didn’t influence your decision. So I mean, it, that it’s, it if someone, for some people

ARMAN:
It might, for some people it, some people it might. And if they’re willing to pay for that, then I think that’s where brands have to decide. But I think it’s better for brands to decide as opposed to being forced, you know? Yeah. In my opinion, I think it’s okay.

STEVE:
Well, the, the, the customer’s driving this, so the, if the customer’s gonna drive the retailer, the retailer is gonna push it. I mean, it’s, it’s a, you know, some stuff rolls downhill. .

ARMAN:
Yeah, that’s true. And if you tell the customer, okay, you want it that way, like, again, you want the, or like, you know, me, I like the organic, you know, smoothies and I want the source for my food. I want the source, you know, and I’m willing to pay 30% more for the organic non G m o smoothie and juice and food period. Right. And with food, it’s gonna go in my body, I’m willing to pay, and I know it’s gonna cost more. So I just think it’s, if the customer’s demanding that and they’re willing to pay more ’cause they understand that it’s gonna cost more then I don’t see the problem. You know, I think, like you said, the problems come when it’s possibly gonna be imposed on people that maybe can’t afford it or don’t, don’t know how to quantify it, could put ’em outta business.

STEVE:
And in my opinion, anyway, until, until laws come into effect on this kind of stuff, it’s more of a marketing play than it is anything else. Right. And the, you know, if you’re forced into measuring ROIs . . . you gotta do it anyway. It’s Right. But at this point, it’s tough to measure it. It’s tough to, it’s a tough investment to make when you can’t measure it. Sure. As, as any investment is when you can’t measure it. So that’s and I, like I said, it’s a difficult subject to get into, and I don’t have a solution for it.

ARMAN:
No, I know, I know. But it’s a good conversation.

STEVE:
I tell people, if you’re a manufacturer, it’s getting pushed down on you just expect that. Right.

ARMAN:
True. True. And I think to take an example from a different market real quick and then we’ll move on, is look at the auto market, right? It’s like if you’re gonna be Tesla, or if you’re gonna be even B M W or anyone, you, you decide, and, and like some of them go all in like Tesla, all in electric and, and, and you know, the environment and others are like, you know, they have their hybrids, they have their electric, and they’re keeping, you know, it’s like they’re keeping that diversification.

STEVE:
I hear you. But the, the, the, the other manufacturers aren’t getting government subsidies to do it.

ARMAN:
Right. That’s true.

STEVE:
That makes that decision a hell of a lot easier. True,

ARMAN:
True, true, true point. Okay, cool. So t take us through another couple of these trends that, that you’re seeing and that you think are important for, for, you know, up and coming products, companies to, to consider as they’re trying to, you know, get into the market, you know, establish their brand.

STEVE:
Yeah, I’m not sure if there’s any real specific trends that’ll help with that. We can talk a bit about, you know, just the, the general process of buying.

ARMAN:
Yeah. Let’s, yeah, let’s get, let’s get into that. Let’s get into that. Yep.

STEVE:
And it can, it can be different. There are a lot of different . . . I always try to help suppliers understand that you really need to understand, you need to, to be empathetic. And this is why Polymath is a great forum for this. You need to understand, put yourself in the, in the merchant’s shoes and, and figure out, you know, understand their business, understand what motivates that merchant to, to make decisions, to be able to, to really you know, like we to, to get in there and really grow and, and, and help. What you wanna do is make your, your, your, your, your merchant a hero and help them grow their business. And think about it in terms of not what you wanna sell, but in terms of what’s gonna help them. Most people are gonna start, if they’re, if they’re going into a channel or a, in, in, you know, into a geographic market, you’re gonna start with a trade show.

It’s a good place to start. We talked about that a little bit earlier. There are kind of a few different ways. There’s, there’s your, your big national trade shows. National hardware is one that I, you know, but there’s, you know, the computer electronic show, all those, all those big shows which are valuable. They are crowded. Getting a share of attention from a merchant can be difficult. You gotta lure them into your booth, hope it’s the right person. It can be very helpful. But it’s also hard to manage. And, and it, like you said before, you’re kinda just kinda hoping somebody comes into your booth. The one kind of step removed from that is at least with a lot of distributors, if you’re, if you’re working with two steps in our industry, you know, ACE and True Value and do it best, and those kinds of stores have vendor shows, these are different.

You actually have to be invited to come into these things by the retailer. A lot of times they’ll actually have some, they’ll, they’ll take at least a small bit, a bit of your product into their warehouse to be able to service the shows. But this is where the, the dealer, the, the distributors putting on the show and their customers, which are the store owners or the, the people that are responsible for these independent stores are coming in and actually placing orders at the show. You should not expect that at a big show. If you get it, great. But that’s kind of the exception that proves the rule. Yeah, making contacts there. You’re starting, you’re starting dialogues at the, at the vendor show. The dealer shows you’re actually getting orders. It’s expensive. It is, they will admit it is a profit center as well as a sourcing form for them.

But if you get invited to ’em, it can be extremely productive. The buyer’s not inviting you. He’s not inviting you there just to make money for, for, you know, you know, whatever it is, three to eight K. He’s, he’s there expecting that there are, there’re gonna be orders placed. And you know that as you place more orders, lemme back that up a little bit. If, if you’re talking to a big box retailer and they’re not entirely sure that this is an absolute home run, they might invite you for a test market where maybe they put you into 30 stores to see how it does for a certain period of time. If you hit benchmarks on sales that they want you to hit, then it’ll be written in the contract that, that then that puts you in their inline business and they, and you’re on the shelf with a co-op or a distributor.

They don’t really have that kind of authority at the store level because you have store owners rather than store managers. So they, what, what they’ll do to kind of test the waters and not just test the waters. This is also for existing suppliers, but they’ll invite you to one of these shows where you actually have a chance to prove yourself. So if you, if you get into enough of the stores and stuff that, that’s a, that’s a pathway into getting more into the, into the the warehouses and then actually getting some of their national advertising, which, which then they can force you into the stores and, and get, you know, nationwide with you know, 3000 stores or whatever they have.

ARMAN:
Yeah, no, and we’ve been, we’ve been, you know, we’ve been down that road with, with a Just Lock with, with Orgill was the first, and they got their two a year and then do it Best and others. And you know, while, while I know your expertise is, you know, been in, you know, hardware and d i y you know as you know, you know, I, I had the electronics product with, with Exeter Technologies back in the day. So, as you said, every industry has a version of this, you know. And I’ve seen now, in several industries, that process happens in somewhat of a similar fashion. Although every industry has its nuances. And one way or another, as we said before, there’s always resistance. Like it takes a while to get into the warehouse and whatnot, because, because there’s other guys in there. It’s like, there, there’s politics, right? And that’s why you kind of have to, there’s a staying power that has to happen. You don’t show up at one or two trade shows and think we’re done, we’re in. It’s like, no, you want to be in this business, get in this industry, get to know people. I mean, look, you guys have spent 40 years fostering those relationships.

STEVE:
Yeah. If, and for a supplier, especially if you’re going into a form foreign market, they wanna see that you’re, that your feet are on the ground there, you know, often enough they don’t want to. And we are back to the shows a little bit. Yeah. We already talked about stuff and, and that is just a little bit different. The original intention of that was to, to make the show better for the buyers right. It turns out making it better for the suppliers too. But all the while I think it’s a, I mean, I’m obviously biased , but I think it’s, it’s the best way to get in. It doesn’t completely replace trade shows and, and those kinds of, you, you, we do them at trade shows. We do them at buyer’s offices.

But the intention of the trade show . . . it’s changing, but it’s still an invaluable tool for getting into the start market. But that is a first step. And, and, you know, you, you get that first step and then, you know, now where are you? You got, you got a contact or you, you had a good you know, meeting now, now you’re being asked for a, you know, typically they’re gonna, they’re, they have to have a look at your product. You’ve, you’ve given ’em some kind of sample pricing on what the, it might be M S R P, it might be, they might have to ask you for, you know, net, net f o b type of quotation. So preparing the price quotation is kind of the next step. Usually sending samples and, and getting that quote in.

And what I tell people is, be prepared when you’re, we’re coming to either, it’s, whether it’s a buying day or a or a trade show, you haven’t even started negotiating yet. So the two things that I would be prepared for is what you think the M S R P should be. Hmm. And keep in mind that you need to manage your channels. And by the channels, I mean, big box, independent stores, you know, smaller stores in a bit with the online, and I’m not talking about, like . . . if it’s Target online, that’s one thing. If you’re talking about online only, or even if we’re talking into some of the discounters like Costco or Sam’s Club, they work on different markets. What the buyer does not want to see is the same product at another channel that’s cheaper than what he can offer it for.

ARMAN:
Yeah. Or you’re selling it on your own website for cheaper than . . . That’s a no-no.

STEVE:
Protect yourselves. Know what those margins are. It’s all over the place. And we can get into that a little bit later on, but it’s all a GMROI calculation on margins and turns. But you want to be sure that you are leaving enough margin in there for the retailers to survive when you’re selling it outside of brick and mortar.

Right now, if it’s, if it’s, if it’s a retailer that has an online site, that usually takes care of itself. But I mean, Amazon’s the one that and it, I mean, it used to be this, if you talk to Europe they’re concerned with Aldi. Just as we’re concerned with Costco here, where they’re gonna work on, you know, 14 points which nobody can compete with. That’s why you see a lot of the bulk stuff, and you keep it away from apples to apples. Is the way to kind of manage that. You talked a little bit about transition strategy as well. Yeah,

ARMAN:
Yeah.

STEVE:
One of the things as you’re negotiating with the buyers is if you are replacing an existing supplier and taking their shelf space away from them, they may ask for a buyout. That, that there, there are, there are transition strategies.

ARMAN:
Got all this inventory. If I want your stuff, you gotta buyout this stuff.

STEVE:
Yeah. What are we gonna, yeah. How are we gonna deal with this? And it’s tough. I mean, that’s a tough pill to swallow. There’s always, you know, they, there are other things that retailers can do to get rid of that stuff. They can discount, they can, but it, it, like everything else, it can get pushed on, on the supplier and just gonna be, be prepared if when you’re quoting NetNet net f o b, especially to you know, a, a major chain retailer there are programs that they’re probably gonna want you to be involved in. And these are good programs to be in. It’s gonna, it’s gonna increase your turns, it’s gonna increase your sales. It’s going to make sure that the buyer doesn’t get stuck with your inventory, like he was stuck with your predecessor’s inventory. It’s just a, you know, a matter of keeping, you know, depending on the retailer, somewhere between like eight and 15% back in your hip pocket, just to make sure that you can take advantage of those programs and not mess yourself on the, on the margin.

ARMAN:
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, this whole pricing strategy, especially for someone newly coming into the market with, with a product, let’s say, some kind of innovation that might not have, it’s not always easy with an innovation to know what’s the right price point, unless it’s, like you said, replacing a very similar type of item. But what do entrepreneurs, new product developers, inventors, need to consider when pricing. Like, are there any other hidden costs that they need to be aware of? ’cause It’s hard to go back once you quote a price. It might be great for sales, but then you realize, oh man, after we make it and ship it and do all this stuff and all these there are some other hidden fees, maybe a few things people should . . .

STEVE:
There can be, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll see like loyalty programs and new store opening fees and central billing fees, defective item allowances. That’s usually not more than like 1% or so opening order discounts. There’s marketing and ad monies that they’re gonna want. They, they, they will rebates is, is on the, on the flip side of that, rebates is something that a lot of the that’s more to the stores. But yeah, that’s, yeah, I mean, it, it’s always helpful to keep, to keep some back on that. Just to, just to, just to kind of, and, and it’s different for big boxes. Is it, is for, I mean, the, the other thing to, to keep in mind is, and I’m getting a little bit ahead into the, into the, okay, turn on investment stuff, but well, let’s go, let’s just jump into that now.

The buyers are typically evaluated and, and, and bonuses are paid on their, their gimroy, their gross margin, return on investment, some type of evaluation of that. Now we’re, it’s a, it’s a big box that might include some type of a metric on sales per square foot where the distributors, it’s gonna be, you know, it’s, it’s that, that’s not gonna be so much. But the, the, the, the key takeaway there is that it’s gonna really affect your the, the two things that are gonna have an effect on that are margins and turns. Margins is what you’re, what we’re just getting into there. What, what you, you know, what you’re selling price to, you know, what they’re buying it at and what they get. The margin on turns is a little bit more. You’re, you’re gonna negotiate the margin and you’re gonna, you know, you get the best you can.

You know, you figure about probably 15% higher figure in for if you’re, you know, calculating the, the, the the shelf price for right. Independent stores rather than big box. But one of the, one of the things that, that a lot of suppliers don’t really think about is ’cause they get so focused on what they wanna sell, is making the buyer a hero on, on the turns. Mm-Hmm. . And there’s two ways to accomplish that. A is driving sales. And I think that let’s back up on that just a bit ’cause I want to get your thought on that. The other is is inventory. If the be, the better you can do on just in times shipments and stuff, the more, the less they’re keeping in inventory at any, any particular time helps the buyer look like a hero now.

So he might, he might ask for, you know, direct to store deliveries when it doesn’t make sense to you. But he’s doing that for a reason. And it, it’s best to, even if, even if you do the calculation, it doesn’t make sense. And you, and you end up pushing him back into the, to the DC deliveries it’s something that he needs to explore. So, you know, help ’em out. And integrating and, and getting the, the, the smaller shipments, anything you can do to reduce their sitting on inventory makes that buyer look like a hero. And that, and that affects his, his gimroy and his bonus and all that kind of stuff. So really taking that stuff into account. And, and, you know, and back to the, the, the other issue on that, I think really a lot of suppliers think that the sale is done when they’ve, when they, when the buyer gives ’em the purchase order, and now they’ve shipped the products and now it’s on the buyer’s hands, and that it is a really foolish way to go about it.

You need to, you need to make that buy, you need to get that product off their shelves. It’s, it’s, it’s much the supplier’s responsibility as the retailers. And I think that with today’s technology, and it’s a lot of the stuff that your Blue Liner group does they can reach the, the, the, the customer independently of that and really kind of push them in the right direction and, and drive them into the stores. And at least when they’re in the stores you know, make them, give them more information and, and, and, and fulfill that sales proposition as a supplier rather than just hanging on the retailer. Yeah. And I mean, you can talk more about, about what is possible for a supplier as far as, you know you know go ahead. I mean, . Yeah,

ARMAN:
No, listen, absolutely. Well, well, your article, your article spoke to it really eloquently, you know, citing the percentage of sales that are not just influenced by mobile technology and people on their phones, but influencing sales that then get transacted in the store or just direct online purchasing. And any, any big box, you know retailer that we’ve talked to or met with over the last five years, what scares them the most is Amazon and online, anything online. So it’s like, it’s like it scares them, but they realize they have to also compete and, and offer value add there as well. So it’s, it’s, it’s a bit of, it’s become a bit of the wild west. And I think you’re right. The buyer’s got a thousand or 2000 products to look after. If you’re an inventor, you’re a supplier. All these terms, we’re using manufacture, it’s simultaneous. It’s, they’re equivalent terms synonymous. You’ve got one product, three products, so you know, your job’s not done. That’s why you gotta keep going to the shows. That’s why you have to have a website which may or may not have e-commerce. You could sell direct if you’re willing and able to really put a marketing program together to sell direct. Or having a store locator is a great idea, right? On your app, on your website that says, Hey, you could find us at these 37 Do it Best stores.

STEVE:
That, that’s a, that’s a great point. I mean, so put yourself in the, in the, in the, you’re, you’re talking to a supplier that just got a, a test with, you know, who whomever, target and they’re in and in the 30 stores. What can you do as a, as a digital marketing company to help drive those, the, those 30 stores to really kick it in those sales? Absolutely.

ARMAN:
Well, I mean, first and foremost, you want you, yeah, you want those, you want those zip codes, right? Okay. Give us the 30 stores, the zip codes, and then let’s run, you know, a little radius like geotargeting radius of let’s say 20 miles, 10 to 25 miles outside of each store. A there’s lists that could be acquired of actual homes and names and addresses for some direct mailers that can be done, that’s direct mail’s a little expensive and in like the non-digital side, but it’s still plausible. Now, similarly, okay, you got direct mail, now let’s append phone numbers. Let’s append email addresses. So these are people who live outside of those 25 or whatever it is, 30 stores within striking distance. And we could even append, okay, this person’s already a member of let’s say it’s Target or whoever the retailer is, right?

And without even working with the retailer, you can acquire that type of information. And then you can also work campaigns. So what my suggestion at a high level would be like, let’s create some meaningful content and offers, right? Like, here’s the product, it’s the inventor, almost like a mini commercial, 30, 60 seconds. Let’s create it in multiple video formats. Let’s start doing some geo-targeted advertising on it could be TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, you know, Facebook, probably not LinkedIn, but more, more whatever the, the right demographic is within the different networks. And then start driving the offer. How excited will the buyer be to say, wow, you guys are actually doing some ads driving people to either the store locator page on your website, which point star store, or directly to some offer, or because it’s a localized ad in a particular town, you’re just giving someone, Hey, get it at Target.

Here’s the address, click here to get it now before we’re outta stock, or whatever the offer is, the compelling offer to, to get them in because there might be a special deal, a two for one, whatever it might be. So those are some of the simple things. I mean, maybe not so simple, but certainly doable within, let’s say a one month campaign that can be set up, those geo-targeted lists acquired. Again, all this requires some budget. You have to have an expert or experts, you know, like, you know, agencies like Blue Liner that can actually do that. And then you have to have a bit of a budget to advertise. And then the beauty is that it’s all very measurable, though. We gotta create some kind of QR code or some kind of offer strategy that when they do the redemption and the purchase in the store, it can track back to, to that particular offer. They, they have it on their phone or they, they have some kind of incentive to communicate that it’s because of this campaign that it, that I went to buy the product. And then you show it to the buyer when you have your quarter, your annual meeting. Yeah, exactly.

STEVE:
You, you come in with you, you come in with this as your plan in the initial meeting and you’re saying, this is what I’m gonna do to, to, you’re not gonna get stuck with this product. I’m gonna help you move it off your shelves. And you’re, you’re taking, I mean, anything you can do to mitigate the risk that the buyer’s taking is make ’em look like a hero and take away his risk. You’re making it a lot easier to say yes.

ARMAN:
Yeah. And, and you know, and it’s interesting. I just thought about it now. But this has come to play before where we’ve utilized this. You can use that as part of your negotiation with the buyers as they’re pushing back on price and co-op and all that. Well, we’re going to, we’re gonna take on this responsibility and, and because of that, we need to make sure to protect these margins a little bit because that’s how we’re gonna, we’re gonna pay for those ads and we have the experts that can imp implement it. And obviously if you have any, if you have any past experience with that, that could show the case studies from past work you’ve done, past campaigns, other engagements, that’s always more convincing. But if you don’t, you’ve gotta put a a di a reasonable plan together. Something that people, you know, the buyers know they’ve seen a lot of this, right? And they know which of their suppliers does good marketing to support them and support the, what’s the word you use? Turnover, right?

STEVE:
Yeah, I mean, you, you’re talking to, when you, when it’s, it’s a great part of negotiation because again, the buyer and the buyer’s mind is the gimroy, the, the, and that’s about margins and about turns as you are explaining to him how you’re going to, to, to increase his turns, there’s the prices on the margins, and you, you can expect a little bit higher margin if you’re gonna increase his turns. And that’s acceptable as long as it all comes down to the number he needs to hit. Right. that you’re, you’re absolutely right. That’s a, that’s, that’s a way to, to, to to, to negotiate better pricing. And but obviously you’re gonna be spending some money to, to, to do it, but you don’t, you don’t wanna be one and done. Right. The, the point here is to is to, is to, is to .

It’s, I heard I had to really grow within the retailer to get in there and become a, a, a part of his company that is integral and that, that that can’t get rid of. And, and normally, you know, over the course of time, and I’ve been this at this for quite a long time, you can see from the gray you keep an account for, you know, a typical retail account you’re gonna keep for seven to eight years. Yeah. So as you’re, as you’re doing your calculations on what you think the, the the total value of this account is, you know, and, and feeding in all the stuff you’re gonna have to spend to get it, that’s what you should be looking at somewhere in, in, you know, you’re gonna keep it for 78 years and then after that, after that, everything’s gravy. If you can keep it for longer, a lot of people can, a lot of people keep it for shorter ’cause, you know, of whatever reason. But the tip, the, the average seems to be about seven, eight years.

ARMAN:
That’s a good, Hey look, that could be a really good amount of business and, and, and a pathway bridge to, to many other, your next product or your next set of deals. And just learning how to do that type of business. So, so the summary of a lot of what you’re saying I’m taking away is really learning how to think like a buyer and understanding what their buttons are and what’s gonna make them look good, you know, to their boss, to their company. And, and, and really to the bottom line, it’s gotta be win-win. But I, I think anytime

STEVE:
You’re negotiating, you have to have empathy for the person. You, you have to be able to look at things from their point of view to be able to Yeah. To give them what they need to say yes.

ARMAN:
Right. And, and I just, I wanna say, you know, for our audience also, I mean, we’re talking a lot about this engagement with, with buyers and, and selling through, through retailers and that’s, you know, our main topic today. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that a lot of these marketing tactics we’re talking about to promote your product can also be employed to sell directly and to promote how you can sell your brand as another channel. Because, you know, channel management is important. And I know that’s one of the topics that, that you’re an expert in. So I want to, I wanna move into that next, but as part of that Absolutely. And why not at least conceive of a direct sales strategy. Now sometimes people think, oh, that’s great because when I sell direct, I can sell it that m ss r p, and it’s like, yes, you can, or, or near it, you have to make sure you don’t undercut your, your other channels.

But that, all of that extra margin, that’s your marketing budget. You gotta figure out how to use that to do some of the things we talked about before, how to drive that demand. B two C marketing and advertising is very pricey, but with all this technology, it’s becoming more and more targetable and targeting is, is available in, in every kind of sector, every kind of age group worldwide. So, so there’s some amazing opportunities in digital, but again, it takes the real expertise, you know, you kind of have to have part of it in-house and then part of it, likely through agencies and, and other experts that can team up with your in-house marketing minds.

STEVE:
Yeah, I mean, it depends on how big you are. If you’ve already got a team that’s doing it, then that’s one thing. But if you’re a startup I, I’m biased ’cause I’ve worked with you before. I, I think Blue Liner did when we did the Adjust Go stuff. You guys did a great job with that. So I, I would, I have absolutely no hesitation in, in recommending Blue Liner for, for that kind of stuff. You talked a little bit about the channel stuff. The channel really, it’s about differentiation. It, it’s possible to sell all the different channels, but you, you just have to be mindful that they can give them an opportunity to, to make their money in their channel. So if you’re selling to, you know, Walmart one item, whatever you’re selling to Target needs to be different. Otherwise it’s gonna come down to it’s, you’re gonna commoditize it.

So whether that’s a different brand, a different product, different design, find some way that the customer isn’t going in there and saying, oh, this is X here and it’s X minus five here, and what, you know, I’m outta here. And then now your buyer’s mad at you and you’re, you’re not gonna, that’s not sustainable. You, you need to especially with, with different channels working on different margins, you have to be very aware of that. Like you talked about, especially with the with, with, if you’re selling on your own if you’re gonna sell, what, if you’re gonna sell the brand that you’re selling in retail on your own at a lower margin, you’re gonna lose your retail business. Yeah. They’re, they’re, they’re not gonna want to compete with you.

ARMAN:
So yeah, we, and we talked about that with one of the, you know, not to be named, you know, one, one of the fashion brands we’re brainstorming about that, that had an a lot of great different product, but to sell in different channel, just, just give them a different line, give them a special line, something different, something unique that doesn’t compete. And that’s, that’s not always easy to do, but that’s, I think, part of an effective strategy. I know you were recommending that.

STEVE:
Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t even have to be drastically different. It just has to be a little bit different. Just, you know, just, just to create a little bit of differentiation. Yeah. That’s great.

ARMAN:
I know we’re kind of rounding out, Steve. I mean, it’s great. I know we can, we can talk forever. So hopefully, you know, the audience here has found it interesting. There’s a couple questions came in. I’ll see how many I can get to here. Well, first of all as far as buying upcoming buying days, I’m not sure if your website, you know, has the updated ones or if not, where can, where can listeners get the updated list of upcoming buying days?

STEVE:
I mean, if you, if you want, just send me an email there, there might be some stuff on the, on the, on the site that needs a little work. You know we’re we’re, we’re, we’re hardware guys. We’re not web designers. So the, the, the king Fisher event is September 26th in Chicago. It’s gonna be at a hotel near O’Hare airport, so it’s really easy in and out. And Menards is gonna be November 9th up at their offices in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. If you want any information on that, just send me an email. It’s ss Powell, s p o w e l l@presidentscouncil.com. I’ll get you the direct link on, on where the, the w be warn that the Kingfisher is sending over about six of their international sourcing merchants. They’re not covering every product. So like plumbing and electrical are the, the, their buyers are not coming over. I, I don’t, they, they may not even have people in place for that, so it’s including most products, but not all. And I’ve got it kind of listed in there on what’s included in, in, in each category and what’s not. Menards is right at their offices, have their whole team there.

ARMAN:
Okay. Okay. Thanks for that.

STEVE:
We’ll get the website fixed as soon as possible.

ARMAN:
For sure, for sure. No, it’s great. It’s great that people are asking, and those, those sound like two very exciting shows. And I like Menards. I know sometimes they could be, you know, controversial in certain ways, but I like what they do.

STEVE:
They are tough to get into, but once you’re in there, they are great to work with.

ARMAN:
Yeah.

STEVE:
That has been, you know, we’ve, we’ve helped, you know, dozens of companies get into Menards, and that’s what they all say is, you know, tough not to crack. But once you get in there, it’s good business.

ARMAN:
Great. Good to know. And one last question. What are your thoughts on on SEMA and, and Apex? There’s these shows, I don’t know if those are shows you, you deal with or know too much about . . .

STEVE:
I don’t know much about those at all. To be, to be honest I, I, those are not familiar to me, which probably makes me think they’re not

ARMAN:
Okay. Well, it’s I’m looking, I’m looking it up. The question came in, well, one of them, well, that’s what, why these are more automotive related. So it, it sounded so familiar when he mentioned sema because that’s, that’s one of the auto shows that we had taken Exeter Technologies in our park zone products and back. More familiar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, so man, it’s been a while since I’ve been at those shows. That question came in from, from one of the audience members, but I do remember, in addition to c e s the CIMA show was very effective for us to get in front of same type of conversation we’re having about the d I Y market on the automotive. And particularly we were in automotive electronics. And man, that was 20 years ago when we were doing that with Exeter Technologies and doing some of the first smart car types of tech. And nowadays, as we know, automotive and electronics is like hand in hand. Everything’s a smart something or another. So yeah, if I,

STEVE:
If I’m gonna offer one piece of advice for those major shows, and I would include the Eisenhower Mess and, and the hardware show in this is don’t go in with just, you know, we’re gonna put up our, our banner and, and hope people come by. Do as much work on the front end. If they’ve got like, you know, buyer matching programs that are available, take advantage of ’em. You know, try, try to get the word out, whether it’s, you know, do some social media blitzing beforehand try to drive traffic. It’s same, same as what we’re talking about with the retail. Don’t count on the show to drive traffic to your booth, drive it yourself. Do as much as you can to set up meetings during the show. And, and, I mean, know that people aren’t gonna make those meetings necessarily, at least not on time. The, the shows tend to stretch everyone’s, the, the schedules get blown outta the water, but the more you can do on the front end before the show, the better the show’s gonna be for you.

ARMAN:
Yeah, agreed. No, I agree. I mean, it’s always, there’s the pre-show, there’s at the show, and then there’s post-show, and it’s like three, three phases. And usually the post show when everyone’s tired and, you know, kind of, we’ve talked about with different shows we’ve all attended over the last six months, you’ve got the stack of business cards, these leads, and people need follow ups. They need the information that you promised them. And that’s, that’s a big part of the discipline. We’re we do have some more questions coming through, but we’re, we’re running out of time. So Steve,

STEVE:
I see one here from Scott McVay. Scott, just, just send me an email. We, we can talk about Menards. I understand what you’re, what you’re talking about here. And I can, I can talk you through that real quick.

ARMAN:
Great. Great. Yeah, no, Steve you, you’re, you’re an unbelievable resource. You and I know se send my best to your dad as well. I know he founded the organization with, with a partner, and you’re, you’re the heir apparent. You’ve, you’ve taken it on and, and made it your, your, you know, career and it’s just pearls of wisdom, you know, coming out of you. So any additional questions that didn’t get answered I’ll make sure to share them with Steve. Make sure to leave us, you know, your email address, either in the LinkedIn comments or in whatever fashion you got introduced to this this podcast. Steve, thanks for your time, man. We’ll see you soon. Thanks

STEVE:
Everyone.

ARMAN:
All right, cheers.

Coming off a decade in helping to grow Health City Cayman Islands from a startup to a premier destination for healthcare, Blueliner has a compendium of notes: what tactics work, what do not, how to target different regions, how to work across borders, and finding the right strategic partners, among other items. In collaboration with the 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing, Blueliner Founder/CEO Arman Rousta presents a workshop to guide viewers through the do’s and don’ts of medical tourism marketing.

The video in its entirety can be viewed below, or accessed through the following, unabridged transcript.

Thank you all for joining. I’m Arman Rousta from Blueliner. Been at this for quite some time and just thought this would be a good opportunity, and it’s something we’re doing more and more here. As an agency, just really looking to share knowledge, share knowledge with small business owners, larger companies, entrepreneurs. We, we love working with growing businesses. In this particular space of medical tourism, we spent the last 10 years helping to launch what is now one of the preeminent medical tourism destinations of facilities, hospitals in the world by the name of Health City in the Cayman Islands. Through that experience and our previous experience working with other doctors, healthcare providers and tourism agencies companies, everything from airlines to hotels to actual destinations, countries, governments we’ve really gathered a lot of experience in both of these areas.

And we’re here today to share some nuggets and snippets of of what we’ve seen and what we’ve put together as best practices in, in the space, in really these combined industries tourism and, and wellness slash healthcare. So let’s dive right in. I have a deck, again, a deck that we’ll happily share with whoever’s interested. You could, you could DM you know, myself or, or any members of our team. We also have our VP of Sales, Steve Powell available, you know, through LinkedIn or through email. You can find us and or just DMM in the in the comments there. And we’ll, we’ll share this deck with you. So, what we’ll do here today best practices in medical tourism marketing. It’s, it’s a, it’s a big one. We probably would have to have a whole course for, like a whole semester to share everything.

So, my aim and goal today is to really just give some high level points and show you how we go about and have gone about as we’ve worked with different companies and, and particularly for Health City, because, you know, there is a difference between, you know, a a hospital or a doctor that might wanna accept patients from, from out of their main territory. And an operation that’s built entirely for medical tourism, right? And, and we looked quite a bit at all the other competitors in the region, so to speak, that are accessible from, from the us let’s say. And a lot of them are in the cur, the, in the Caribbean. In, in Latin America. Some people will travel as far as, you know, India or Thailand or, or, or wherever, wherever it takes, especially based on the seriousness of, of the condition or whatever.

You know, the healthcare issue is is it life or death, or is it something cosmetic like dentistry or other kinds of cosmetic services. So, you know, the term medical tourism really can, applies to a lot of, a lot of broad range of different types of procedures and types of healthcare. So that all, all comes into play based on where you’re coming from. Let’s you know, again I gave a little bit about Blueliner’s background without going through this whole content piece here. You can, you can see who we are, where we’ve been, that we’ve been doing it for over two decades. We don’t exclusively work in, in healthcare. We like to use the term wellness ’cause that then covers, you know, alternative forms of health and homeopathic and acupuncture and that whole space, which, which I’m a huge fan of and believe is a very effective whole area within healthcare.

So we do a lot with, with that, as well as tourism, which is a fantastic space to work in. So we’ve been doing it. And you can see on the side some of the services that we offer and some of the particular specialty areas within healthcare that we also cover and, and work with our clients on. So that’s the Blueliner team. If you know me, you know, everything goes through the seven pillars modality and model. It’s, it’s what is the Seven Pillars? It’s a framework. It’s a way to analyze and understand where you’re at, where your business is at, and we can, we can meet with Google and Facebook on their marketing and put them through a seven pillars analysis, as well as a pure startup that’s just conceiving and bringing their idea to light. The Seven Pillars framework kind of sits above all of that as kind of an objective way to look at whatever it is you’re doing and your team is doing well, what they’re not doing well.

And that’s the beginning point of charting a strategy towards making an improvement or reaching a new goal or launching a new product. So what you’ll see today is we do the analysis of, of some particular healthcare companies. And we break down their marketing. We’re always using this framework because it, it, it, it really helps with, with the science and the art of of marketing strategy. We use a, a, a visual, kind of a, a visual approach called the Matrix. And, and it’s basically a way to map, it’s the matrix. The best way to describe it is it’s a map, or as we say here, a multidimensional chess board that enables marketers, entrepreneurs, investors, project teams, to really visualize who’s working on what, who’s in charge of the different areas, the different tactical and strategic areas.

What are, what are the goals for, for those areas and for the marketing and the business overall. And, and then how are we doing very importantly, how are we doing and, and where can we improve? And that’s, again, what you’re about to see here. As we objectively break down three companies that disclaimer that we don’t work for. We’re looking at these particular hospitals and health providers in light of, and on behalf of our clients to say, Hey, what are they doing well? How can we, how can we understand where we stand in relation to them and others? And of course, every organization has different budgets, different resources. And I always say, you know, when we’re coming up with goals for a a project, it’s very important to be realistic and, and, and pair those goals to the, the I, right? The goals is the r, the return on investment, the r o i, the i is the budget. And you know, you, those things have to go hand in hand.

So we looked at three organizations. This was an, an analysis from it’s not too dated within the last 12 months, let’s say. So you know, again for these particular companies that we’ll cover if they’ve made some improvements in the last few months, that won’t be covered here. Hopefully if anyone from the agencies or the organizations that we’ll be discussing is on the line or, or gets a, gets a look at this presentation a hopefully it can be helpful to you in terms of a constructive critical analysis. And b, if, if you’ve already looked at those things and made the improvements apologies, and please let us know, and we’d be happy to do a follow up to show how you’ve looked at an issue. It’s, again, it’s, it’s, it’s like healthcare, right? There’s diagnostic you look at it, if there’s issues, there’s a a prescription, and if the prescription’s followed, there’s an improvement, you know, in, in the outcome.

So, <laugh>, as you can see, marketing in general and, and business growth works very similar to, to wellness and healthcare in terms of you know, if you, if you, if you take the advice and implement it, well you get a good result. So let’s take a look. First and foremost we looked at Baptist health in South Florida. And you can see we give them rankings, and again, in general as far as marketing overall, then across some of the specific pillars we know within the Seven Pillars framework. So as you could see here looking at the website in particular and I could also pop open the websites as we go through this, but first I’d just like to go through the deck. Simple, comprehensive, easy to navigate, engaging leveraging technology for a better patient experience by using apps, which is a big, huge trend in, in not just, you know, medical tourism, but just healthcare in general. Combining the strategy for how patients could engage their services, their whether they’re a new patient or whether they’re trying to manage their existing relationship with, with a healthcare provider. It’s a combination of website account and apps that does that. And then good, good creativity and and, and accessible website as well.

Really positive on website content. It’s always a hard thing to do content management and it, particularly for, for healthcare. And then, you know, medical tourism adds another layer because there’s all types of content about not just how to book the service, but how to get here depending on the travel. So, you know, a bit of this kind of concierge concept comes into play. You really have to handhold patients and perspective customers through, through your content. So it’s not just about volumes of content, it’s about quality. And in this case Baptist also has a, a podcast, another very popular trend which, which has good, good ratings and reviews which is, again, good for branding, good for ongoing engagement, medical health advice whether or not you’re actually booking a, an appointment with them to depend on those providers and their doctors for ongoing advice.

About one’s health is a great strategy. It’s like the very top of the funnel, as we’d call it in marketing. It doesn’t mean you’re getting revenue from that from that group, but it means that they’re, depending on your, your thought leadership, which is very important. When we look at a content, which is pillar one in the system, the first thing we look at in, in marketing and the most important, I would say, because all the other pillars like ss, e o and social media, all play off of content. So content is, is still king and Baptist does a good job at that design and use your experience of the website. Again, you know, good navigation features like web chat which is, could be annoying from a provider side to make sure you staff web chat, but it’s, it’s people have questions. There’s a lot of information on pages. It’s good to have that as a, as a plugin, as an add-on to be able to engage people as they’re browsing the information on, on a website. And then, of course, good quality calls to action as vital as well. And you know, these guys did pretty, pretty good on that front.

Now, moving into the third pillar, again, pillar one, content, pillar two, design ux, we covered that in the web. And now the third pillar of organic search. And this is just as a lot of tools out there there’s some free tools some paid tools. Really, the top end conductor and BrightEdge are, are on the top end. So there, there’s so many. If you’re interested in, in looking at an ss e o tool, you can, again, dmm me on the side here. If you are on LinkedIn, if you wanna put a comment in the, in the chat for the event or just, you know, shoot an email, happy to recommend different tools. You know, most of them are pretty decent. And at the end of the day, this is what you wanna look at, how much traffic, not just how many keywords are we ranking for.

And in this case, Baptist does really well ranking for, you know, as you can see, hundreds of thousands of keywords because they offer so many different vast healthcare services. And you want to see where the rankings are, but more importantly, how much traffic is coming from, from those organic listings. And in this case the estimate we did through the tools we used was over 300,000 per month in terms of website visitation. And that’s a pretty good number. But again, everything is relative. You know, a smaller single doctor, single provider practice has different goals than a huge hospital like Health City that has over 150 doctors and the whole spectrum of specialty areas, right? So, you know, the, the, the context of that for one’s goals certainly varies. Some of the scores on the technical side of the website were not that good here because of missing page titles, internal linking issues page speed, load time, and those types of issues can affect the website, can it can affect the user’s experience. Again, when we talk about medical tourism, and someone may be coming from a, here, they’re in South Florida, so someone could be coming from a different country in the Caribbean or Latin America, maybe the internet access isn’t as good or strong, or they’re on the move. And if your website technically isn’t up to speed it, it could load slowly and be an issue, and someone clicks off, clicks out. So technical site health is just as important as the front end and how that looks.

Digital ads in this case, we didn’t give a high score to the ads. You know, for the reasons noted here clear and consistent headlines, strong CTAs, looks like they were using a lot of stock imagery here. And yeah, it just didn’t, it didn’t stand out. Of course, you know, that pineapple icon and logo is, is, is, is, is cool. I mean, we, we thought it was interesting, and it’s obviously a good branding stamp, but we didn’t feel inspired, you know, by the creative here again. And sometimes that, that seems like a subjective comment. But and since, again, we don’t run their ads, we can’t really tell you per se how effective they were in converting clicks to conversions, so to speak. But yeah, we, we just felt from a creative standpoint there was something that could be improved upon. There.
:
Again, more as in terms of content, this would really fall under pillar five, which is c r m, customer relationship management, and all of the touch points. Once you’ve gained a prospective customer or existing patient’s information email, ss m s they’re already in your contact database now, how, how do you communicate through different types of emails, different types of newsletters, et cetera. And in this case, you could see some examples of what Baptist shares there, and some of that is B two B more for the doctors and the providers. Social media, you know, pillar six, a good score. And again, you know, there’s vanity numbers, which is, you know, the number of followers, but then there’s the, it’s the creativity, it’s the content, it’s the consistency of, of the posting. And it’s, it’s the, the branding, the way it looks.

And as you could see here, is it consistent across the different social networks. And in this case we, we, we felt pretty good about what they were doing, not just in terms of the number of, of followers, subscribers, fans, but the the pace of content, the type of content and, and how engaging it it was. And you can see that if you drill down into posts and how many likes, how many shares is there, are there comments? It’s, it’s easy to tell when you drill down a little bit with any social media, how engaging it is. And if, if it’s for your own website and own business, you’ll see, because people will reach out and actually ask questions about services or click through if you have links and calls to action, to landing pages that, that then manifest in appointments and bookings, which is ultimately what what most providers in, in this space, in this medical tourism space would be gearing for.

And then in this case mobile which is, you know, pillar seven we gave a pretty low score here because and this could apply to apps and to websites. And in this case the mobile website performance you know, was below the standard. And you could just see a lot of this gets run through third party tools that, that measure the page load speed time. And in this case, again, technically speaking the numbers were all, were all on the, on the lower end side of performance. Again, these are things that hopefully anyone from Baptist comes on or sees this they, they can address or maybe have addressed within the last, you know, bunch of months since this analysis was done. Again, this is all just, it’s technical, right? Again, just like healthcare, it’s technical assessment.

There’s gonna be pros and cons for every marketing team, every web team. And as you can see here, as we’ve presented, it’s been an overall good assessment, but some areas that leave some room for improvement next. And, and we’ve got three. I’ve got three in this presentation. I probably only go through the first two because I do wanna open up a live look at one of my favorite medical tourism websites. It’s not a destination or a location I’ve ever been to but I, I would like to share it because I, I think really when it comes to medical tourism, particular they, I put them right here with Cleveland Clinic as Cream of the Crop and Cleveland Clinic obviously a vast healthcare company doesn’t just focus on medical tourism for sure, it, and they’ve got multiple touch points, multiple locations.

But we’re, again, from a marketing standpoint, this was the audit in this case, a an an excellent, fully integrated digital strategy, which means, you know, hitting all the different pillars and touch points and doing well unparalleled high quality content in multiple formats, you know, from podcasts and, and whatnot to just pure web content. And again, like anyone, a a little bit of room for improvement as we, as we can see in their website, design and user experience, but really excellent on the advertising side and social media. An unbelievable content library, of course, a very well resourced organization here. So you would expect that they would have both internal teams as well as agencies working on all of these things. And patient stories being, I would say, and from the, our health city experience, one of the biggest, most impactful forms of content is hearing true, authentic patient stories.

It’s not like, again, it’s not a stock video or a stock picture, it’s not a hired actor doing a commercial, right? It’s a real patient that had a real story, sometimes gut wrenching stories again, life or death types of situations. And if you heard my podcast last week with Shamari Scott, who’s the chief Business Officer at Health City, and he tells the stories about Dr. Shetty, the visionary founder of Health City, and how his inspiration as a, as a cardiologist working with children, saving their lives his story about Mother Teresa and how she helped him clarify his, his vision and that vision leading to, you know, all the success that he and Health City and their parent company in Arianna Health have had. Because, because of their passion, because of their vision, how that’s touched the lives of, of millions of families that comes through patient stories, right?

It’s one thing to hear from the doctor, it’s another thing to hear from the patient, and it’s even another thing to see the patient giving the doctor a hug or some type of post-op testimonial. Really powerful. And these guys at Cleveland Clinic certainly do that well again, a, a a pretty solid user experience on their website. You know, their prominent site features always linked to useful content, good use of iconography. I think iconography is very important when it comes to healthcare marketing in general, and, and tourism as well, because there’s a lot of information and people don’t always like to read. So, icons of different body parts of different services really guide people. People are very visual learners and, and we respond to visual cues and icons are important in that space.

Organic, again, the enormous just volume of keywords and, and traffic as, as we’ve been able to assess it through the, the tools that we use for s e o and organic search. And as we would’ve expected, Cleveland Clinic does extremely well in that regard. Technical site health, always a tough one, even for it, it tends to happen with larger websites and larger companies ’cause there’s just such high volume of content and pages. So inevitably there’s gonna be large numbers of these warnings and these errors. And when, when a web and marketing team has to look at 4 40, 700 errors, again, it’s, it’s, it’s like anything in life. You can’t always address everything you have to look at and make some really critical professional decisions on what the priorities are. So again, we’re not gonna sit here and look at all 4,700 errors, but you know, if, if, if Cleveland Clinic was was Blueliner’s client, we, we’d, we would take a look and every month we would say, okay, how much of a budget or we would prescribe, we put at least x amount of hours, let’s say 50 hours, a hundred hours a month from the web team to fixing the top structural issues.

And certainly site map errors and duplicate meta descriptions. These are issues that, that are impacting us maybe in ways we can’t fully feel today, but, but there are some very clear paths to where these issues can cause problems and negative review or just a bad user experience from someone that could have been a, a patient slash customer, but chose another route because of one of these errors or issues. So again, there’s always room for improvement, even for the big guys on the block. Digital ads pretty decent creative, clear and consistent headlines and colors. Decent use of illustrations. And yeah again, nothing super inspiring. But again, when it comes to healthcare you know, not all the marketing is, is always that exciting. You know, it’s a regulatory environment, you have to be careful what you say. So it’s a different standard as, as opposed to tourism, which is a little more engaging in general. So that’s what makes medical tourism and healthcare tourism interesting, because it’s like, it’s that crossroads and it’s the chance for the advertising, the creative to kind of come, come up a notch.

Social media, just, you know, tremendous volume, tremendous volume, really good execution creatively graphically as well. So really no, no complaints or too much advice, you know, for Cleveland Clinic. There, again, if, if there were our client, we’d want to dig in and try to find ways content-wise to stay on top of and grow the, the thought leadership platform, continue to grow it. But they’re obviously already investing quite a bit in that, in that space. Mobile and core web vitals as, as opposed to Baptist, they’re doing a bit better here on the mobile side. So, so really more up to industry standard. You could see when you see more green and yellow on the page versus red that’s a positive in this regard. And so Cleveland Clinic’s doing solidly there, so I’m gonna stop it there.

The third hospital we looked at was actually more of a local one in Cayman. And again, a local as opposed to a global company like Cleveland Clinic is of course not gonna have the same resources or do as well. And again, they’re gonna have different goals. So I’m gonna actually skip over this one for now and switch over and do a new screen share and introduce you all to Bum Run grad Bum Run grad, which is in, in Thailand. It’s a it’s, it’s a facility that we looked at quite a bit as we were working for Health City. They they just set a standard in a number of ways. And I think as we have this up, and I scroll through the website a little bit, I’ll talk about and really highlight some of the best practices that they’re implementing, that I think anyone who’s involved in the field of medical tourism should really pay some close attention to.

It’s it’s a complicated space, right? When it comes to of course the, one of the reasons medical tourism has become very popular is because, especially in America and the us, our healthcare system is, is broken, broken across and in so many ways that again, needs its own webinar <laugh> or workshop to discuss. But a lot of that is just the ballooning, crazy ballooning costs insurance, who’s covered. And even if you have insurance, what’s covered. You know, this is the reason a lot of people travel outside of the US looking for care. So as you can see, the way bu run grad has it, it’s almost like you’re on Amazon, right? It’s like e-commerce in a sense, where you’re seeing, they’re talking about numbers, they’re talking about prices. That’s not something you see or hear about a lot in US healthcare because everything seems like it’s magically gonna be covered or paid for, which as we know, it’s not. People need to understand how much things cost, right? And in this case you could see they do an excellent job. Look at this. There’s packages right now, this isn’t in dollars, but if I was interested in, let’s say this Cancer and Gene screening, so to speak, they have these screenings. Let’s, let’s, I’m not gonna add it to the cart, but let’s learn more about this.

Let’s check out this screening, right? So again, good, good website architecture, a lot of information. So we’re gonna have to organize it. There’s a search bar, right? There’s a nice, this called Breadcrumb here, where you can always go back to other packages and home. I like this, right? This is kind of like, I’m, I’m on, I’m on Orbits or TripAdvisor, or, you know, tells me how many other people are, are actually viewing this package right now. Again, very e-commerce, very kind of web best practices, and you can actually x this thing out here. All right? And then this is nice. You, you can see the cost in dollars and you can see that I can, you know, again, medical tourism, you don’t know where people are coming from. So if you’re coming from somewhere in Europe, you can see that it’s about a thousand in Euro here in the us.

So I’d like to see this price, right? So about $1,100, you could see exact good information, right? I mean, medical tourism and just healthcare in general, good communication about what’s included and what’s not, right? More details about which genes are covered in this screening, okay? Again, good information, a video with some education. We don’t have to watch it. But a lot of good information here. We talked about the use of icons, right? This after reading a lot, it’s nice to see, okay, I can click a button to call or click here to send an inquiry about that in particular, book or book an appointment, right? Three really good calls to action. I really do like that they’re giving information in this case about what genes are actually covered in that screening. So one could come in if you need to delve into the details. You’ve got the pricing. And now if you needed to send an inquiry or book an appointment, I really like the way their forms work. We hear a lot of complaints in healthcare about filling out forms and too much information or which form to fill out. Bum run grad does a really good job with a lot of different services. They, they offer to and let’s just go through this experience together, right? So I can send an inquiry. Again, this is a good user experience, not too many choices here, right?

And then you can, you can post in some information and and then submit. So not, not too complex there to reach er and grad international to reach the contact office in my, in my country. So that’s nice, right? It’s giving me the chance to switch. And if I come here, then they would have their country of origin. I’m guessing that this is the list of countries where they actually have an office, right? And you could see that. And if you are in a country like the US here that doesn’t have a, a bummer Andre office, then you would just go directly to the international group, right? So even here, if you go into a particular country, say China, they would actually have in China the different sub offices. So again, just very intelligent contact user experience there. I wanna go back to, let’s see, when it comes to medical travel, they have their travel guides.

Again, good use of icons, find a doctor, send an inquiry, book an appointment. Bummer on grad anywhere, which is, by the way, talk about a big trend in medical tourism and any kind of wellness any type of health service. I mean, you could be a sleep specialist, you can be a physical therapist. Think about it. I mean, this applies to psychology, obviously. And this whole concept of 24 7 or around the clock, or getting a second opinion at Health City, we actually call that part of the site. Second opinions and telemedicine, telehealth, right? So, again, really nice use of an expand collapse, because when there’s a lot of information and people get overwhelmed, again, they need these kind of icons. You need this kind of navigation where you don’t wanna see all this content at once, but you can, you can go in and say, what is this bummer and grad anywhere?

Okay, good, simple content tells you what they do. Telemedicine on demand, good use of graphics, and I guess showing in multiple languages and more q and a. I won’t go through the whole thing, but you can just see how they’re mixing in their content here and organizing it. But again, when, if we go back to packages, we can see what’s trending. Now, let’s say I had a problem with my knee and I was looking into like an a c l type of procedure, right? And for whatever reason, my, my local insurance or doesn’t cover or I’m not covered. I don’t have insurance, so I’m gonna need to go outta the country for this. And let’s see how that would work. I’m just gonna come in up and top and write a c l. See, I don’t see any auto-complete. No, there is some auto-complete here. Arthroscopic knee surgery packages. Let me go ahead and check that.

So you’ve got some good information. Look at this right away. I can get to an approximate cost for a an A C L surgery, right? You can see eligible patients, you can see what’s included, including two night hospital stay. Again, this is, this is tourism, this is medical tourism. It’s not just about the procedure, it’s about, it’s about the post-op, it’s about the recovery and, and the, the, the, the, the physical therapy. And again, the destination matters. You’re gonna wanna see what that, what that place looks like and what, what the food is like, and need a bit of a concierge service. So I can actually, let’s just see what it’s like to book an appointment for this particular package, or add this package to your cart. Again, very much e-commerce, like, and regardless of the cost, right? If it’s for a self-insured company and you’re in HR for a self-insured company and someone in the company needs this procedure, this is great information.

I mean, the fact that healthcare and wellness companies hesitate to put prices up because the price is gonna be different for everyone based on X, Y, and Z. Yes, I understand that and those complexities. But customers and people wanna know information. They want clarity and good communication. And so I would say I’d put this very high up there, top two or three medical tourism best practices. Give people an understanding of what’s included, what’s not, and what the prices are. Even if it’s, you know, yes, starting at, and there could be add-ons or things that raise the price, and you could let us know about that further down the path. But if I’m working in HR and benefits for a company that’s paying self-insured, we want to get prices and we want to know the estimate before we advance this conversation. And then we can have the conversation about insurance, what’s covered, what’s not.

And there’s even packages. So let’s see how their communication is on that page. Again, just very good use of colors and navigation. This expand collapse, they’re talking about international, local brokers, all kinds of details that, that are, are important. That people that are in benefits departments and that deal with insurance would, would understand and find very useful as well as, oh, okay, yes, our provider’s up there are not excellent, excellent job. By bummer and grad, always got a phone number. Again, shopping cart, very e-commerce. Like I, they did have a section on their website. I, I don’t know if I want to dig into it now where they not only showed the prices, they actually showed the range of prices and actual SS customers that have been there over the last 10 plus years. ’cause These guys have been around for a while.

And it was like actual numbers, actual spend, not just estimated spend. And I’m sure that’s still there somewhere, but I’m not gonna dig in for it at this time. I did just want to go back and check one more form as we’re here together really digging in and see, okay, if I’m going to actually book an appointment let’s see if it actually look, it actually carried through. Very smart. It carried through that a c l procedure ID into this form. Very nice expectation here. And guidance, right? Choose a preferred date or earliest date available. Very good. Let’s say I was, again, a preferred date. Doesn’t mean I’m actually making an appointment, but let’s say time of day, prefer date, option two, okay? And this could be an emergency. Let’s get out as soon as we can. You can upload files need a c l, prepare.

Let’s see what the next page looks like. Okay? Now we want to know your name. We want to know where you’re from so we can get in touch with you. I’m not gonna proceed further from here ’cause we’re, we’re running into our time constraint, but again, bummer, run grad.com, check them out. As well as the slides that we shared before on the, on the various competitors. I’m gonna actually come back to the deck as we wrap up here. Just really a summary and conclusions from what we looked at from the several sites that we audited. Cleveland Clinic, again, and bummer on grads, you know, very high end great content, great navigation, great use of iconography and, and, and communication, setting expectations, giving prices, giving numbers. Really credit bummer on grad for that.

And I think in medical tourism, that’s essential. Content, all about content. And yeah, again, remember, best practices are ever evolving. More healthcare companies and especially in tourism, thinking about all the apps people use, like leading tourism apps, TripAdvisor, Airbnb. I think the trend is gonna be more of the medical tourism will be going in that direction, looking like those tourism apps. It’s about the procedure and the healthcare you need, but it’s also about the destination, right? Again, that destination wellness concept and, and how nice are the accommodations and what happens if I wanna bring my family and friends during my recovery period. So I think you’ll start seeing more and more evolution and, and fusion between the best practices in tourism come over to the healthcare side. So I’m going to say thank you from here and let’s see if we have time for a question or two.

Okay. Just looking at a log, a few questions come in. Do what, where do you see AI’s role in patient care for this industry? Yeah, that’s a wonderful question. I think that’s the one we’ll take before we wrap up here. Well look, I mean ai, I put into AI the context also of auto automation and automation in terms of as we looked at the website there and, and that contact form. How do you again how do you take in a patient’s information and what they’re interested in and use AI to anticipate the kind of questions they might have, right? Imagine like a provider like BU run grad that has all that data that I mentioned about the cost of care, the outcomes, the typical FAQs that all of our thousands of prior patients have asked.

So it’s gonna be the top providers mining the data and information they have intelligently to anticipate the kind of questions and decisions, decision points that the patient would have and, and kind of anticipating it and, and sharing the information and engaging in advance. So that’s, that’s one example right there. Same with, same with, again, post-op, you’ve come in for the procedure, now you’re in rehab. Well, what are the thousands of patients that have come before me and what are the best practices in terms of the different milestones I’m trying to hit in my recovery and my rehabilitation? And being able to you know, use AI and use the data that we have intelligently to, to pinging patients, Hey, you know, it’s day seven, day 10 post procedure. You might be feeling sore today. Here’s three videos you can watch and three recommendations from others that have been in your position.

So I think it’s the AI is gonna be very effective in terms of just mining best practices in, in healthcare and recovery, in getting the best outcomes and sharing that information at the right time with the right people. And, and that can also tie, so it’s kind of, it’s, it’s not completely automatic ai, it’s combining with how patients are responding. Maybe it’s like you’re getting an automatic survey once a week on how you’re feeling, or you’re using an app that’s provided by the provider. And based on how you’re evaluating your, your stiffness, your soreness, how you feel physically with whatever your condition was, pre, pre-procedure, pre-treatment, during treatment, post-treatment. So I believe that’ll be the most prominent use of ai. It’s gonna be this, this machine learning component and just really building intelligent models based on the way patients slash customers are, are reporting how they feel, how they’re doing, and what they’re doing.

How’s your diet been? We prescribed you these five things. Oh, you checked off. I, I’m only, I’m only doing these three, but I’m still kind of breaking these two rules. Okay, well that could explain why your recovery’s taking a little longer. So again, using those data models and how patients are interacting with, with their self-reporting and engaging and also the doctor’s assessments and taking all that data. AI is, is getting better and going to get better. So it’s about are the providers and the apps and the websites applying that kind of user behavior and user intelligence into into the treatment and the kind of refreshed healthcare advice that they’re getting from the doctors and from from the ai, right? So that’s gonna be interesting when the AI models start generating recommendations that may or may not be different than, than the healthcare providers. Kind of more manual assessments. But I think a lot of providers will, will really start depending on those AI models and recommendations to take them into account as they’re giving their advice to patients.

So I hope that’s helpful everyone. Thank you for joining. Again, I’m Arman Rousta from Blueliner. Get in touch with me. It’s just arman@blueliner.io if you’ve been listening here on LinkedIn. Thank you. We’ll be doing more of these at least two or three times a month, looking to share knowledge, looking to share information, best practices from the seven pillars model from the 20 years plus of, of work we’ve done for thousands of clients across, you know, healthcare, tourism and other industries, or Blueliner. If you have any questions, if there’s any way we can help you or your organization or you have an entrepreneurial idea for an app, for a website that gets me excited, that gets our team excited. We’re an entrepreneurial team at the Think tank. You know, b.labs, which is the parent company for Blueliner. So it’s been a pleasure to be with you all today. Thanks for the questions. Thanks for your attention. And be well and have a wonderful day.